Ubuntu 13.04: Only Some GNOME Components To Be Updated, GTK Not One Of Them

According to an UDS session held a few days ago, it was decided to stay with stable GNOME for Ubuntu 13.04 and only update some components. 

This means Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail will ship with GNOME 3.6 for the most part, and not 3.8 (currently under development as 3.7.x), at least according to the current plans. But this might change.

The plan is to update glib, d-conf, gobject-introspection and gvfs and to offer a PPA for the latest GTK. For now, it has been decided not to update GTK, but that might change during the cycle "if there is a good reason for the update", mentions the GNOME Plans Review blueprint.

The UDS GNOME Plans Review session notes talk about the reasons why Ubuntu 13.04 won't use the latest GNOME by default:

• tracking unstable GNOME is taking lot of resources
• The Ubuntu desktop is quite less "stock GNOME" than it used to be
• GNOME unstable series and Ubuntu "working every day" are hard to conciliate goals
• GNOME is not communicating early enough on what is coming for us to discuss next cycle at UDS (see nautilus 3.6 in quantal)
• GNOME is shipping stables with transitions half done (see gstreamer 1.0 this cycle) which is not something we want in Ubuntu
• Our "feedback loop" with GNOME is not really working nowadays

And indeed, this shouldn't affect the Ubuntu desktop too much and should bring more stability, but it does affect GNOME Shell (and thus Ubuntu GNOME Remix) users quite badly, since without the latest GTK, they won't be able to use the latest GNOME Shell either, among others. And that pretty much defeats the whole purpose of Ubuntu GNOME Remix. 

But, to solve this issue, Ubuntu GNOME Remix might ship with the GNOME 3 PPA enabled by default:

[...] if the GNOME remix becomes an official flavor, I was hoping to then ask for permission to include the GNOME3 PPA due to our unique overlap with the flagship Ubuntu release.

- Jeremy Bicha, main Ubuntu GNOME Remix developer, on the Ubuntu desktop mailing list

We'll let you know if the plans change.