[Mageia-dev] Cinnamon

[Olav Vitters]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 03:11:03AM +0800, Joseph Wang wrote:
> 1) IMHO, it's a lot nicer UI than Gnome 3.  It's basically a more
> advanced, prettier Gnome 2, with
> a KDE-ish menu.

This does not matter at all. If you want to package something, then
you're pretty much free to do so.

There are only some logical rules, most basic ones:
- be willing to maintain the packages for a long period (years)
- be responsible for the bugs
- upstream has to be active
- don't cause problems for or bugs in other packages

> 2) It's actually pretty easy to drop in.  There are three RPMS, and
> they just sit on top of Gnome 3. The dependencies are all one way
> (i.e. cinnamon depends on Gnome 3, but nothing depends on cinnamon)
> The hard part with dealing with the install was to get the startup
> commands right.

That is not true. Cinnamon packaging problems caused GNOME to have
(incorrect) dependencies on Cinnamon. This resulted in GNOME not
starting. This aside from just the time it took to investigate (QA team)
and the impact it had on one of the alpha releases (took a while to fix).

As Cinnamon consists of various forks of existing GNOME packages, the
likelihood of incorrect dependencies (or provides) is pretty high. As a
result, this makes packaging Cinnamon more difficult than usual.

If you spend loads of time on Mageia, or package loads of things that is
greatly appreciated. But at the same time, we're all volunteers working
together to make Mageia better. So even if you just maintain (IIRC) the
3 packages needed for Cinnamon, that'll be still appreciated as long as
Mageia overall improves.

-- 
Regards,
Olav