GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode [LWN.net]

GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 22, 2012 20:55 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950)
In reply to: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode by Thanatopsis
Parent article: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Be warned that if you go the jhbuild route, it'll suck up loads of time before you actually get anything working. The "GNOME OS" bit is not to replace a distro, but to ensure that "GNOME" behaves like an OS.

Or in other words: ensure that you can easily join development. Be able to provide people with the latest GNOME release as a VM, including all the various system dependencies which are needed by GNOME. Be able to fully test the whole "OS" (meaning GNOME but also the system dependencies).

To answer your question:
The way that jhbuild does this is by installing everything in different prefix. So instead of /usr, you can have the entire GNOME stack (+ some dependencies) in e.g. $HOME/gnome. You can then tell GDM to launch $HOME/gnome/bin/startgnome.

What I forgot is that this will still share the "dot" files. We've put a lot of work into supporting the XDG directories (~/.config), which can be changed using environment variables. Quite envious of KDE here (they solved that years ago).

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GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode

Posted Nov 23, 2012 0:39 UTC (Fri) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]

Ok. I've used a tool similar to this in the past when I needed newer GNOME libs so I could build the latest Anjuta on RHEL 4.5. Forget the name of the tool at the moment. I believe it is no longer maintained.

So what is keeping everyone who desires to, from running GNOME 2.x & 3.x side by side?