Hi Stefan, I really appreciate you taking the time to investigate and test! I agree that the labels of the Cinnamon releases are not very clear. But the version numbers do following the Gnome versioning scheme, where even numbers are considered stable, and odd numbers are considered development releases. So "2.2.x" would be "stable" for public usage, and the "2.3.x" branch is still in development, and not considered appropriate for general public usage. It does make sense to concentrate on one branch for openSUSE, and as I mentioned before, and so it would be good to focus on the version of Cinnamon that other big distros use in their stable releases. Stefan, I really appreciate your offer to create a OBS home Cinnamon repo from the 2.2.x branch. I'd be glad to do extensive testing for you. Sorry I'm not very good at developing and creating packages, or else I would offer to help. Just a few observations that might help, mainly based on the Arch packages that are a bit simpler for me to understand: 1. Here are all the patches that Arch makes to the main "cinnamon" base package: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=... It looks like they apply a patch (from Mint's GitHub apparently) to support the new version of upower, a few python fixes, a Linux user group change, and some Gnome 3.14 compatibility fixes. So there's not a lot of patches, and they seem to be coming directly from Cinnamon devs (i.e. not necessary for Arch or openSUSE to actually develop patches to fix specific problems.). There are also some specific Cinnamon options that they set for their packages, (using "sed") which are just options that affect compatibility with different distros, but at least the compatibility does exist, and they're not patches per se. 2. The other Cinnamon programs don't seem to be heavily patched. For example, this one doesn't have any patches: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=... 3. I've been using Cinnamon on Arch for close to a year now, and the only major problem (which is now fixed in the above mention patch) had to do with upower, which was updated to a newer version on Arch but not on Ubuntu/Mint. This broke the power control features for a while. But they later fixed it, and the patch is offered by Cinnamon devs for other distros that need it. Apart from that, there are no other major bugs, and Cinnamon 2.2.x has been extremely stable and nice to use on Arch on about 5 systems I've tried. Again, thanks very much to everyone for their time and effort. I really do feel that tracking the release of Cinnamon on Mint would offer a very stable and attractive desktop for openSUSE users, hopefully without too much additional work for openSUSE packagers. Looking forward to your replies, Cheers, Sam On 10/20/2014 02:30 AM, Stefan Elser wrote:

Hello everbody,

I had take some time and searched at the Fedora, Debian and Linux Mint repositories how they build their cinnamon versions.

Marguerite is totally right that there is no real "stable" version or a release tagged "stable" from the Cinnamon developers itself, however it seems that Debian and Fedora are useing the .tar.gz sources of the latest stable version from Linux Mint repositories (which is actually 2.2.16 in 17 / Qiana).

Also I've done some selftesting and switched from GNOME Shell to Cinnamon for fulltime this weekend. I have to admit, that there are really some annoying bugs in the latest git build. For instance, the battery icon does not refresh and the clock widget for the taskbar is defunct.

Marguerite said, that we haven't have that manpower to work on two versions and I have to agree in this point (even if there were a lot of submits with the latest updates) but we really should think about to either switch to the "stable" version or at least trying to provide this "stable" version in another repository. Cinnamon isn't really useable in this state (IMHO).

The dependencies is another upcoming thing which gives me a little headache. As far is I know, the GTK3 version is heavily patches and Linux Mint, however version 2.2.16 is running fine with latest Fedora and Debian unstable releases without any "special" patches for GTK.

I can just offer that I will make a "home project test build" with 2.2.16 and we can see how this is working out for us. Later we can think about how to move on. But again, I don't want to do something Marguerite isn't comfortable with.

Best regards Stefan

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Von:S. mailto:sb56637@gmail.com> Gesendet: Don 16 Oktober 2014 17:00 An: marguerite mailto:i@marguerite.su>; Stefan Elser mailto:stefan@fam-elser.de>; opensuse-packaging mailto:opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org> Betreff: Re: AW: Cinnamon Stable repo for openSUSE X11:Cinnamon?

Hello Marguerite and Stefan,

Thanks to both of you for your time and replies.

I think that if you can only focus on a single branch, it would be best to focus on the one that Linux Mint releases to their stable distribution. At the moment, the Cinnamon version that Linux Mint is offering to the public is version 2.2.16: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/tree/2.2-maintenance

Would it be possible to use Arch Linux's Cinnamon sources? https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=... I currently use Cinnamon 2.2 on Arch, and it is extremely stable and relatively bug-free.

I think that the best use of your limited time and development resources would be best focused on the branch that Linux Mint offers to the public. Because the currently major bugs in Cinnamon 2.3 that are present in OBS X11:Cinnamon:Factory are because the Linux Mint development team is still developing it, and it is very much a beta product. It is practically unusable at this point. In fact, I'm sure that the same 2.3 branch of Cinnamon doesn't work correctly on Linux Mint either, because it's not released to the public. On the other hand, if the openSUSE Cinnamon team could track the currently stable branch of Cinnamon, you would only have to focus on bugs that are related to openSUSE integration, and not on bugs that Linux Mint is working to fix in their development process.

Again, I really appreciate your efforts to offer a stable Cinnamon environment for openSUSE. I tried to use Mate and XFCE, but they have major problems with GTK3 windows that use client-side decorations. Apart from Gnome Shell, only Cinnamon properly handles GTK3 windows with client-side decorations. So for the**huge** number of users that don't want to use Gnome Shell or KDE, the only real alternative is Cinnamon.

Thanks for your time! Best regards, Sam

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