Subject: bug#27264: gnome-shell-3.24.2 consistently dies during initialization

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2017 02:29:02 -0400

Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> writes:

> Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> I have a question: Does GNOME 3 work for *anyone* in Guix now?  If so,
>> that would be useful information.  If not, I wonder why this got merged
>> into master.
>
> I'm sorry, I don't actually use GNOME and should have tested it before
> pushing. I have been busy lately and didn't want to hold up the branch.

In the future, I think that pushing an updated desktop environment to
master should only be performed by someone who is able and willing to
test it.  Modern desktop environments are quite complex, and many things
can go wrong even if the code compiles.

> It would be good to have a system test for GNOME and other DEs so we can
> catch these problems earlier.

I agree that it would be good to have this, but it would require a
massive effort to produce a sufficiently comprehensive test suite to
render manual testing unnecessary.  In the meantime, automated testing
is not an adequate substitute for user testing.  To my mind, only
someone who actually uses the DE in question to do real work will be
able to meaningfully judge the result as usable.

> I'll try to help fixing this later today, but feel free to revert the
> updates meanwhile.

GNOME contains a great many components, and I don't fully understand
their interdependencies.  It's not something that can be easily
reverted.

      Mark