Gnome Project Policy

1. Meta Ebuild Policy

The Gnome Herd maintains a meta ebuild named gnome. This meta ebuild is intended to install all of the packages considered by the upstream GNOME project as being part of the Gnome Desktop. It is not intended to be customizable, with two exceptions: hardware customization (cdr, dvdr, hal), and accessibility. This is the recommended method of installing the Gnome desktop on a Gentoo system.

The primary alternative, if you require specific Gnome programs, is to emerge them individually. If, for example, you want to use Evolution for email, you should emerge evolution. This should pull in any necessary dependencies to run evolution.

There are many subsets of Gnome that can be installed and usable. There is no way that the Gnome Herd can support them all, or any significant fraction of them. We do make one such subset available: gnome-light. This subset is intended to include the programs necessary for basic desktop functionality without any additional applications. It basically includes gnome-session, gnome-panel, gnome-terminal, nautilus, metacity, and yelp. This is a session manager, a start menu/panel, a terminal program, a desktop, a file browser, a window manager, and a help browser. This subset is largely unsupported (as none of the Gnome Herd members actually use it), but we will fix problems with it as we can. Gnome-light can be used as a jumping-off point for installing intermediate subsets of Gnome between it and the full gnome meta ebuild, by emerging extra applications as necessary. No other subsets, including making the gnome ebuild more customizable with USE flags, will be supported.

2. CFLAGS Support

Upstream GNOME does not support any advanced CFLAGS beyond -O2, and neither does the Gnome Herd. Unreproducable bugs with any CFLAGS beyond -O2 and appropriate -march are liable to be closed as INVALID unless they can be reproduced with valid CFLAGS.

3. Bug Priority

Bug priority table

Priority	Description
Pri-1	Major bugs in the desktop. This will also include Trackers (so the trackers are easy to find).
Pri-2	Most bugs in the packages we maintain that have been verified as "real" bugs and require fixing. Also includes version bumps.
Pri-3	Bugs identified as "user-specific", those that aren't verified and are most likely to do with a specific users settings/issues.
Pri-4	Requests for new ebuilds that we'd like to maintain, time permitting. Requests for new ebuilds that we don't want to maintain should be re-assigned to maintainer-wanted.
Pri-5	The Gentoo Gnome wishlist

The contents of this document, unless otherwise expressly stated, are licensed under the CC-BY-SA-2.5 license. The Gentoo Name and Logo Usage Guidelines apply.

Page updated August 3, 2006

Summary: This the policy document for the Gnome Project

John N. Laliberte
Author

Daniel Gryniewicz
Author

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