KDE vs. GNOME on F10

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Aug 5 18:47:24 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 08:01 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:

> >I don't want to get between the lines here (there are good arguments and
> >against updating Gnome and KDE for older releases) and I hate buzz-words
> >like "Corporate identity", but I find it more and more odd that one
> >doesn't know what to expect from Fedora, because similar sized things
> >(KDE and Gnome) are handled quite differently.
> 
> Short of passing a policy that says no major desktop upgrades for stable
> releases, I don't see this changing.  If we did pass that, I have a feeling
> it would piss off a lot of people.  Passing the converse (always upgrade)
> would piss off just as many.
> 
> I'm not that enthralled with starting a "who do you want to piss off today?"
> campaign for Fedora.

We've had this discussion before, but to re-state my opinion: the only
sane way to handle this is multiple, discretionary update repositories.
A repository for security and stable bugfix updates, and a repository
for other updates - major version bumps whose purpose isn't solely to
fix a security issue or, with minimal changes, a clearly identified bug.

It's more work, but it's the only workable consistent system that
doesn't restrict some maintainer from being able to do what they want to
do. A distribution with much fewer resources than Fedora (Mandriva) has
been using this system successfully, to the satisfaction of developers
and users, for several releases now.

The system gives users the flexibility to choose whether they want a
'traditional' stable update system, or a more adventurous,
version-upgrading system. And maintainers can choose whether or not they
want to take on the work of shipping updates in the adventurous
repository. In all cases, users and maintainers both know what each
repository is for, and what they'll be getting depending on which they
choose to use.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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