[Needs-Packaging]Decouple unity related settings as unity-settings

Bug #1735998 reported by Khurshid Alam
12
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubuntu-settings (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Khurshid Alam

Bug Description

This is an attempt to resolve "* Shared GSettings keys" issue listed under https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/NotDefaultIssues.

Ubuntu so far is providing session related overrides for both ubuntu & unity sessions in a single package, i.e. ubuntu-settings. But now that Unity is not the default desktop it doesn't make any sense to carry unity related overrides in ubuntu-settings.

For this purpose I have created a new project: unity-settings (https://code.launchpad.net/~khurshid-alam/unity-settings/trunk) and the binary would be unity-settings in universe.

To make this happen in under 18.04 cycle, the work-flow should be:

1) Have unity-settings in the universe
2) Have ubuntu-unity-desktop in the universe
3) Let ubuntu-unity-desktop depends on unity-settings
4) Drop unity related settings in ubuntu-settings (merge request in-progress)

Tags: bionic
Changed in ubuntu-settings (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
assignee: nobody → Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam)
description: updated
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

> But now that Unity is not the default desktop it doesn't make any sense to carry unity related overrides in ubuntu-settings.

But we have per-session overrides now so it's fine to have overrides for other desktops in ubuntu-settings.

Why do you think you need to take those settings out of ubuntu-settings?

Revision history for this message
Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam) wrote :

@Jeremy

>Why do you think you need to take those settings out of ubuntu-settings?

1) We can ship all sorts unity specific overrides in unity-settings. It's cleaner that way.

2) We want to ship per-desktop override of ".desktop" (ex: Gnome-software) on "/usr/share/unity/applications". Rather patching each app individually we could do that in unity-settings. That's what ubuntu-mate does in ubuntu-mate-settings.

3) Not every gnome app will work well with unity. If we want to use a alternative we need to override mimeapps list in "/usr/share/applications/unity-mimeapps.list". We can easily do that in unity-settings.

4) The idea is to have a separate ubuntu-unity-amd64.iso. But in the default iso, both autologin and user-session names set to "ubuntu". If we want to change that to "unity", we could do that by shipping a override in "/usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/51-autologin.conf". unity-settings seems proper place to do that. Other option is to carry similar settings in lightdm.

5) In future you may want to demote all unity related components/bits to universe. For that you need to decouple unity-session from gnome-session and a separate unity-settings.

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

Ok, I see how you need a unity-settings binary package for #4. But I still don't see why you need to remove gsettings overrides from ubuntu-settings. And I think almost all customizations except #4 could go in the ubuntu-settings package.

A benefit is that users coming from Ubuntu (or other flavors that depend on ubuntu-settings) will already have ubuntu-settings installed without needing to have unity itself depend on ubuntu-settings or unity-settings. For this reason, we might even drop the vanilla-gnome-default-settings package once someone gets around to merging its settings in to ubuntu-settings. I encourage other Ubuntu flavors to consider doing that too.

You could even build the unity-settings binary package from the ubuntu-settings source.

Revision history for this message
Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam) wrote :

@Jeremy

1)

I only removed unity specific gsettings overrides from ubuntu-settings.

Is there any specific reason to carry unity specific gsettings overrides in ubuntu-settings? Unity is not a default desktop anymore nor it is installed in the default live iso.

2)

We carry unity specific gsettings overrides in unity-settings and make unity-session depends on unity-settings. That way Ubuntu and Unity remain separate without overlapping.

3)

And as you said we also want to decouple unity-session from gnome-session so two pieces code remains separate.

It will easier for us to maintain unity if we keep these separated from one another.

Revision history for this message
ventrical (dale-f-beaudoin) wrote :

@khurshid

4) The idea is to have a separate ubuntu-unity-amd64.iso. But in the default iso, both autologin and user-session names set to "ubuntu". If we want to change that to "unity", we could do that by shipping a override in "/usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/51-autologin.conf". unity-settings seems proper place to do that. Other option is to carry similar settings in lightdm.

Khurshid,

I like this idea and I appreciate all the help jbicha is giving you but with our current manpower resources we may have to settle for a flattened and leaner unity7. I don't expect you to do all of this work by yourself. It has been my contention that we try an use any and all of the gnome components that we can, however, I trust your direction on this. I will try and recruit more help.

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

> Is there any specific reason to carry unity specific gsettings overrides in ubuntu-settings? Unity is not a default desktop anymore nor it is installed in the default live iso.

Yes, by centralizing the settings, it makes it easier and faster to change overrides for multiple flavors. It also allows for easier comparisons between flavors.

I don't think there's a problem with review of Unity merge proposals for ubuntu-settings taking too long. Currently, the Unity team doesn't have any direct upload rights, right? So you'll need review anyway.

Revision history for this message
Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam) wrote :

Ok. I don't have any problem having "unity-settings" on universe without removing gsettings from "ubuntu-settings". They won't collide. They both set same settings for unity any way.

summary: - Decouple unity related settings as unity-settings
+ [Needs-Packaging]Decouple unity related settings as unity-settings
Revision history for this message
Rudra Saraswat (rs2009) wrote :

@jbicha I'm not sure why this package wasn't approved, since the other flavours do have settings packages (such as ubuntustudio-default-settings and lubuntu-default-settings, as well as kubuntu-settings-desktop).

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