Plans regarding the MATE desktop

[kraileth]

When I talked to my boss about the server topic, he also briefly asked about how the GhostBSD project was going. I told him that 11.0 is still being worked on because the project's own repository is not yet in place but that a lot of research had been done on this topic. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that the primary desktop is MATE, though. Just yesterday MATE 1.18 was released and the fact that we're still on 1.12 is... well, probably a little embarrassing (*cough* NetBSD's pkgsrc has had 1.14 for quite some time and even the Solaris guys from Ilumos have 1.14... *cough* *cough*).

I remember when I read the quaterly status update from the Foundation that mentioned that MATE has been updated to 1.12 and I've waited to read about another update ever since. But obviously nothing ever happened.

There's even this GitHub repo that holds ports for MATE 1.14. I had tried it out in December, I think, and everything built and the desktop was usable. However if I remember correctly, Pluma just dumped core when started. And there may of course be more subtle bugs in it.

However my question is: Does anybody know somebody from the FreeBSD GNOME team? Since we're just consuming FreeBSD ports even for our core components like the desktop: Do we know what the midterm to longterm plan is regarding MATE? Is there anything that can be done to accelerate things a bit? I'd imagine that there are people out there who would lend a hand if they knew what the exact current status was and where help would be needed! However the GNOME team is either not active at all or rather bad at communicating their activity... The GNOME page on FreeBSD still mentiones the EOL versions 10.1 and 10.2 as being supported and it's hard to see any kind of progress on the GNOME front!

It would be nice to at least being able to switch to MATE 1.14. Version 1.16 may not be too interesting for the users since it's basically about adding GTK+3 support to most major applications. However it will be rather interesting for us - because most applications need new port options for GTK+3 and we'll have to test those before too long. Version 1.18 released yesterday is the first release to completely drop GTK+2 support for MATE. What is our stance on the toolkit version?

IMO it makes sense to stick with version 2 for the end user when we adopt MATE 1.14 and then enable GTK+ version 3 in the testing repo for those applications that already support it and use that a while internally to see if everything works well. Same thing for 1.16. And whenever we move to 1.18 we won't have any choice, anyway.

[ASX]

a) FreeBSD itself is much more oriented toward stability than cutting edge software.

b) quarterly repo is about stability, and we already decided to stick with quarterly, that will be always behind "latest".

c) ports are a community effort, unless we become ports committer we will be unable to change that.

d) following the removal of commit bit to John Marino (synth author) I lost every trust on FreeBSD core team, there is clearly a mismanagement of ports and specifically human resources, even worse, they dropped one of the most qualified commmiter. (That's also why I left the FreeBSD forum).

Being unknown the reason about his commit bit removal, to this date, they are also failing to communicate properly.

So, deal with honesty with your boss, and tell him the thruth, no matter how much unpleasant it may look.

https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedul ... hn_marino/

[ericbsd]

I am or was part of gnome team and manly responsible for MATE ports, but I am limited of what I can do. Right now the MATE in dev is 1.16.

There is huge test needed for 1.16 if you want to help there is an IRC channel #freebsd-gnome were most the conversation are taken.