Aaah, it’s always fun to try a new development release of the GNOME desktop. I use it too much to really have patience with the early releases of a development series (this may change if and when I get around to hacking on GNOME) but by the time the betas come out it’s usually pretty stable, and this time it’s more stable than ever before at beta stage, largely due to the new GNOME policy of always-building CVS, and the time-based release schedule which has ensured that not too much was broken during development. Certainly, this way makes development a bit more gradual, but we get stablisation as well as new features, which is always good.
Perhaps the biggest thing to change is the panel structure — gone are the different types of panel, and instead we have but one kind of panel which can pretend to be all the other kinds of panel, leading to much greater flexibility. The rounded corners on the menu panel are gone of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an applet to emulate those before too long. However, I personally don’t miss them, as it’s a bit odd to have rounded corners on a dead-square TFT screen like mine.
The other biggest thing one notices is that some of the library dependencies and packaging have been moved around. The one that may cause upgraders compiling from source the most grief is the removal of the liblinc package. All liblinc’s functions have been moved into bonobo-activation, and so if, like me, you upgrade using the ebuilds from BreakMyGentoo — which are no doubt similar to the ebuilds which will end up in Portage for 2.4.0 final — you will find that you have to recompile everything which links to liblinc, as bonobo-activation blocks on the linc package, thus forcing an unmerge before you can continue.
Happily, emerging a recent version of gentoolkit gives you the revdep-rebuild script, which although slow, is capable of finding everything that’s linked to libraries which don’t exist and attempting to remerge them. It doesn’t work out of the box, as if you don’t do an emerge -u world regularly (which I do not recommend as it’s the way to all kinds of grief especially if you’re using unstable) you’ll find it trying to remerge versions of packages you have installed — versions which have been pruned from the Portage tree.
My tactic, which worked fairly well, is to take its temporary file .revdep-rebuild.4_ebuilds, edit it to take out all the versions and then do something like ‘cat ebuild_list | xargs emerge’ to emerge all the packages in the file. You might want to do a pretend emerge on that first of course…
Hmm, I’ve digressed somewhat. One disappointment in GNOME 2.4.0 beta 1 is that the click-in-window-to-raise-it behaviour is back in Metacity, despite being out of CVS HEAD last time I checked it out. I shall check it out again and compare; with any luck the 2.5 Metacity is coming from a branch. I don’t want to have to try and persuade Havoc to change this behaviour a third time…
UPDATE: Looks like the Metacity maintainers have gone for the Bad Way to do quite a few things, so I’m trying out how well GNOME and xfwm4 get along, because although I love GNOME’s environment over XFCE, xfwm4 seems so much more sensible, and for some reason manages to have almost all the correct behaviour. What a shock that is.