gnome3-session is not installable as gnome-shell doesn't exist

[Chris]

Binary package hint: gnome3-session

$ sudo apt-get install gnome3-session
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 gnome3-session : Depends: gnome-shell but it is not installable
E: Broken packages

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package gnome-shell is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'gnome-shell' has no installation candidate

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: gnome3-session (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-1.28-generic 2.6.38-rc2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-1-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Jan 30 13:47:39 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Netbook 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-session

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

confirmed, the gnome3-session binary should be cleaned out of natty

[DavidZemon (david-zemon)]

I would like to use gnome-shell but get the same error seen above. Why is gnome-shell no longer in the repos? I understand Unity is a shell for Gnome 3, but its not the same and I would like to compare the two, and possibly use Gnome's version.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

gnome3-session is not needed anyway as gnome-session has support for Gnome Shell in the GDM session switcher.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I attached a branch which I believe fixes this. I'm not entirely sure how package removals work though.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

As I mentioned in the merge proposal, we unfortunately can't remove a binary package from a release.

Marking fixed for oneiric, as gnome3-session is gone there.

[funicorn (funicorn)]

how can you guys be so sure about what you have done. I tried to install gnome-shell from the gnome-shell ppa repos, and I got the same error telling the package can not be found. Tody is August 6. The bug is NOT fixed. The bug status is lying.

[funicorn (funicorn)]

By the way, could you please read the bug report from users more carefully ? The problem is not the gnome3-session package can not be installed. The point is users can not install gnome-shell because it's missing in the repos.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

funicorn, it was widely announced that Gnome Shell was not going to be ready for inclusion in the Ubuntu 11.04 repositories because it wasn't ready. Once a Ubuntu version is released, it is impossible to add new packages to it, not to mention that it would require adding all of Gnome 3 to a Gnome 2.32 distribution which is extremely disruptive.

This kind of bug can only be fixed in the development release of Ubuntu, but it has already been fixed there! In Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric), all you'll need to do is sudo apt-get install gnome-shell and everything should just work.

[funicorn (funicorn)]

Nope, the problem is, several months ago the Natty users CAN install gnome-shell from the gnome3 ppa, and in fact many of them did install gnome-shell from the gnome3 ppa, whereas now they CAN NOT. The same gnome3 ppa still exists and one can see all the package lists on their web page, but apt-get fails to get any packages from the ppa with error message : E: Package 'gnome-shell' has no installation candidate.

Maybe the funniest thing is, there is no explanation on the gnome3 team ppa web page at all, who just behave as nothing is wrong.