On Thu, 2012-07-19 at 11:33 -0800, Jef Spaleta wrote:
an you point me to the relevant discussion for any critical
functionality patches which were actually submitted to the upstream
projects in question and were rejected.
My existing understanding is that unity can operate without any vendor
patches being applied outside of compiz, and the patches to compiz
have been upstreamed.
Everything else is enhanced functionality that is non-critical.
Particularly the xorg patches, as I am not aware of any critical xorg
patches that exist. Obviously the utouch stuff, regardless of its
upstream nature, is not critical functionality.
That being said, I'm pretty confident the maintainers of the impacted
packages are not going to take on substantial non-upstream patch sets
to Xorg and Gnome. It really goes against the upstream what is
reasonable ethos of this distribution. I'll remind you again that
Unity isn't packaged in Debian for a reason. I would suggest this deep
vendor patching of shared components is part of that reason.
I haven't looked at current unity, but the gmenu and gapplication work
that has been included in glib/gtk+ in the last cycle should let them
drop most of their menu-related patches.
This work was done in cooperation with Canonical, and we've invested
considerable effort into narrowing the gap - or preventing it from
becoming a permantent rift.