Stop building this 'fork'?

[diederikdehaas]

The following part of an aptitude full-upgrade -s attempt shows the current upgrade problem:

gnome-shell-extension-prefs : Depends: gnome-shell (= 48~beta-4+pn1) but it is not going to be installed

This means this project/package needs to be rebuild with each new gnome-shell version in Debian Trixie.
Right now this is causing a problem for ppl who upgrade their system. @hrdl-github found the workaround for it (downgrade mutter-common), but after that we have been looking into a possible solution.

And then we found this repo. And as far as we can tell, it all boils down to a single small patch on top of gnome-shell:
a95a40b

As this all seemed quite minor to me, I 'pushed through' the official Debian packages and could thereby upgrade all the pending upgrades. I then rebooted my PineNote ... and it all seemed to work? AFAICT this patch is about suppressing some dialog box ... and I didn't get any. I do see some minor visual issues, but I can't see how the absence of this patch could be related to that.
Thus it seems like an upstream issue. For example, I'm not seeing the full percentage numbers of the battery, only the first digit.

I also asked 'hrdl' to test it to see if he saw any issues (which could possibly be related to this patch) ... and the answer was NO.

So then the logical question arises: Can't we just stop customizing gnome-shell and thereby (essentially) drop this repo?

[diederikdehaas]

I do see some minor visual issues ... For example, I'm not seeing the full percentage numbers of the battery, only the first digit.

I did another update/upgrade this morning and now I do see the full percentage again :-)

[diederikdehaas]

On #pinenote IRC channel I asked if someone was willing to test the upgrade procedure (apart from me and 'hrdl') and 'g​ri573' was kind enough to participate.
The proposed upgrade procedure was this:

aptitude update
aptitude install gnome-shell=48~rc-2 gnome-shell-extension-prefs=48~rc-2 gnome-shell-common=48~rc-2
aptitude safe-upgrade

And when that succeeded, reboot into the upgraded system.

As 'gri573' diligently performed the procedure on OS2, they did encounter an issue:

<g​ri573> ok, so `/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf` on mmcblk0p6 has `root=/dev/mmcblk0p5` in all the kernel parameters now

AFAICT this is a separate bug and unrelated, but it should be investigated and fixed none-the-less.

[gri573]

the drawback to having upstream gnome-shell is that rotating the screen causes the "revert to previous settings" prompt to show, which is exactly what this fork fixes, so that's expected

[m-weigand]

that was the whole point of this. However, I removed gnome-shell from the custom repo a few days ago in response to diederiks issue

[diederikdehaas]

I initially didn't understand what the changes were meant to accomplish, but now I've seen what it's intended to do.
I really hope/expect a less heavy-handed way is possible to accomplish this, but I'm not (really) familiar with GNOME.

If needed, it's still possible to 'revert' to this repo; all that's needed is a higher version and then it should switch back.

[hrdl-github]

PNDeb/pinenote-gnome-extension#23 needs testing, but could fix this.