User:Jlaska/Draft3

This page is a draft only
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.

General ideas/discussion intended to ensure a successful GNOME3 release in Fedora 15.

What is Success?

A successful GNOME 3 and Fedora 15 release are defined as:

1. Runs on a reasonable range of graphics hardware
2. Offers a graceful fallback for the rest
3. Has working controls for common things like keyboards, monitors, network, sound and power
4. All desktop applications work. 'core gnome' applications follow somewhat higher standards for integration and appearance, including
   • Being ported to GTK+ 3
   • Not showing status icons (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/MessageTray/Compatibility)
   • No parent-less dialogs (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/SystemDialogs/Compatibility)
   • A hi-res icon that renders well in the shell overview
   • More information about app integration: http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/AppIntegration

Open tasks

1. Graceful fallback - code is needed to gracefully handle the following scenarios ...
   • Insufficient hardware - the system hardware is known to not handle gnome-shell, and fallback mode is recommended
   • gnome-shell failure - The shell crashes or fails to start for an unknown reason, a suitable fallback should be offered instead
2. Testing - it is important that we test fallback on a broad variety of hardware

Where's the bug?
Are the above open tasks tracked in upstream bugzilla?

FAQ

General

When is the upstream decision made as to whether 2.91.x will become 3.0?

See http://live.gnome.org/action/edit/TwoPointNinetyone/ for the schedule

How is the upstream decision made as to whether 2.91.x will become 3.0? Is it dependent on blocker bug resolution, or release criteria?

Release readiness is monitored by the release team, based on information from various sources such as weekly blocker bug summaries (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-January/msg00170.html), buildability (http://build.gnome.org), etc. There are no fixed criteria.

Where is the upstream GNOME 3 blocker bug list?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&cf_gnome_target=3.0

If GNOME 3 isn't considered ready by upstream, how will Fedora proceed?

There are various options, of which the third one seems the most realistic one:

1. Fedora 15 slips until GNOME 3 is ready
2. Fedora 15 ships GNOME 3 in fallback mode only (shell with metacity+panel)
3. Fedora 15 ships GNOME 3 and arranges for fallback to happen for all but known good graphics hardware

Where can I find GNOME 3 marketing plans for upstream GNOME and Fedora?

http://www.gnome3.org is the new GNOME 3 website

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/ThreePointZero has marketing plans

What testing (GNOME and Fedora) is planned for GNOME 3 ?

For GNOME development releases, see the schedule at http://live.gnome.org/action/edit/TwoPointNinetyone/. These get smoke-tested by the release-team and get some community testing as well. A considerable amount of testing comes in the form of having GNOME development versions in rawhide (currently 2.91.5). There are several Fedora test events scheduled to test various aspects of GNOME 3 (see QA/Fedora_15_test_days)

Features

What happened to the Fedora 14-vintage GNOME shell favorites sidebar allowing selection+presentation of favorite applications and folders?

it was just an experiment that did not work out; it is not part of the final GNOME 3 design

How should multi-monitor support behave with GnomeShell in Fedora 15?

Currently, gnome-shell just treats any additional monitors as extra space to put windows in but otherwise more or less ignores them. When you go into overview mode, it only takes effect on one screen, the others are just left blank. There's nothing yet done to integrate the workspace model the Shell encourages with multi-monitor setups. There's a bug for this, but again, AFAICT no particular commitment to fixing it up before the 3.0 release. (This isn't actually much of a 'regression' compared to GNOME 2, which was similarly lax about doing much with extra screens, but it's the sort of thing people might expect GNOME 3 to have fixed).

There are some ways in which multi-monitor support is better in GNOME3 than in 2.x:

* On the secondary monitor, dragging the window to the top edge maximizes

* We have working configuration for primary monitors in the control-center display panel

* We are also hoping to have working barriers in X soon, so that we can improve the situation when the 'hot corner' is at a shared edge. Barriers have been promised for F15.

Workarounds

What is the procedure to manually revert to fallback mode?

Fallback mode is just that: a fallback. Therefore it is not planned to have a manual 'Choose your UI' UI.

You can of course open the hood and rewire what gdm and gnome-session do. gdm looks at the files in /usr/share/xsessions to find out how to run the chosen session. For GNOME, the file is /usr/share/xsessions/gnome.session and it just executes gnome-session. One way to change this is to use the --session option of gnome-session.

Without a --session argument, gnome-session looks at the files /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gnome.session and /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gnome-fallback.session to find out what should be run in the session. Changing these files might void your warranty...