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

From: Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2017 10:01:56 -0400

Hi Ludovic,

[email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hi Mark,
>
> Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> 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 think many of us use GTK+/GNOME applications, but fewer use GNOME, so
> I suppose we just didn’t test a full GNOME setup.
>
> Next time we should probably do that or, even better, have an automated
> test that logs in, takes a screenshot, and does some OCR to check
> whether we got something that looks like a GNOME screen.

I think this is unacceptable.  The test you propose above is no where
near adequate to assure that the updated desktop environment is usable
for real work.

I'm annoyed that I've been forced to either use a different desktop
environment in the meantime or else sacrifice security updates.  I would
never consider pushing such a major update to master without testing it
first.  I'm astonished that anyone thinks that this is acceptable
behavior.

I'm sorry to be harsh, but I feel justified to air my grievances because
I believe this is the kind of event that will cause GNOME users to label
GuixSD an experimental distribution that's not suitable for one's
primary work machine, but are too polite to complain.  Let me be the
canary in the coal mine.

While it's true that users can boot into an older generation of their
system in an emergency, and that's a *great* comfort, in general it's
not an acceptable fallback because it entails sacrificing security
updates.  I'm concerned that our fallback feature has caused people to
become quite careless with breaking things on our master branch.

     Thanks,
       Mark