Reindl Harald wrote:
as KDE4.0 was anounced for F9 nobody did know if they are
ready and which state kde4 would have in the first release
We need to do some advance planning and development to provide a polished
release to our users, so we have to start importing prereleases of new
upstream software very early in the cycle, especially for a big change like
KDE 3→4. We have neither the infrastructure nor the human resources to do
this work on a separate development branch, so we have to do it in Rawhide,
at which point everything in Rawhide gets ported to the new technologies and
it's very hard to go back.
It is upstream's failure to not have communicated upfront that 4.0 would not
be a release they'd want shipped to end users. There were some developers
claiming it'd be a great new release with lots of new features they were
working on, and a few others merely cautioning that it'd be for "early
adopters" (whom Fedora users are expected to be). That "only for application
developers" claim came only later, when Rawhide was already upgraded to 4.0.
If the upstream developers had been less optimistic about their new release
right from the start, we might have taken a different decision.
That said, I actually think Fedora 9 turned out as a great release, KDE
4.0.3 wasn't quite as broken as some people (including some upstream
developers) were claiming, and KDE got better and better in updates.
Kevin Kofler