Jordi Mallach wrote an article on the
transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 in Debian from the Debian GNOME
Team point of view. "When you’re dealing with dozens of GNOME source
packages at the same time, many of which introduce new libraries, or
worse, introduce incompatible APIs that affect many more unrelated
packages, things get hairy, and you need a plan" Jordi said. But even
with a plan for a smooth transition, they encountered a lot of
difficulties, such as failures to build from source on various
architectures and incompatibilities with
other packages. Finally GNOME Shell 3.2 has transitioned to Debian's
testing suite and Jordi thanks not only all Debian GNOME Team members,
but also Release Team members Julien Cristau and Cyril Brulebois and
FTP assistant Luca Falavigna, who helped in reaching this goal.