Last week, Martin Wimpress (from Ubuntu MATE) and I did a 2.5-day packaging sprint and after that I bundle-uploaded all MATE 1.24 related components to Debian unstable. Thus, MATE 1.24 landed in Debian unstable only four days after the upstream release. I think this was the fastest version bump of MATE in Debian ever.
Packages should have been built by now for most of the 22 architectures supported by Debian. The current/latest build status can be viewed on the DDPO page of the Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team [1].
Please also refer to the MATE 1.24 upstream release notes for details on what's new and what's changed [2].
Credits
One big thanks goes to Martin Wimpress. Martin and I worked on all the related packages hand in hand. Only this team work made this very fast upload possible. Martin especially found the fix for a flaw in Python Caja that caused all Python3 based Caja extensions to fail in Caja 1.24 / Python Caja 1.24. Well done!
Another big thanks goes to the MATE upstream team. You again did an awesome job, folks. Much, much appreciated.
Last but not least, a big thanks goes to Svante Signell for providing Debian architecture specific patches for Debian's non-Linux distributions (GNU/Hurd, GNU/kFreeBSD). We will wait now until all MATE 1.24 packages have initially migrated to Debian testing and then follow-up upload his fixes. As in the past, MATE shall be available on as many Debian architectures as possible (ideally: all of them). Saying this, all Debian porters are invited to send us patches, if they see components of MATE Desktop fail on not-so-common architectures.
References
- [1] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-mate@lists.debian.org
- [2] https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2020-02-10-mate-1-24-released/
light+love,
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)