New bodhi release in production

[Jaroslav Reznik]

On Saturday, August 14, 2010 07:57:27 pm Martin Sourada wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-08-14 at 19:05 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Martin Sourada wrote:
> > > I still remember the epic fail of having KDE 4.0 in stable fedora
> > 
> > * I still think the KDE 4.0.3 we shipped in F9 wasn't that bad. We fixed
> > all the showstoppers before F9 was released, and were also quick to ship
> > updates fixing more annoyances, including updates to later 4.0.x
> > releases. Yes, I used F9 with 4.0.x myself, one one machine.
> 
> Well, I believe most people would disagree with you here. Many of KDE
> user switched temporarily to other DEs because of this, or stayed with
> F8...

I switch to KDE 4.0 in early beta and from that time, I couldn't use any other 
DE ;-) Just a users preference.

> > * KDE 4.0 wasn't an update at all! It was what was shipped with a NEW
> > release. We intentionally DID NOT update F8 to KDE 4.x. Not 4.0, not 4.1,
> > not ever. This kind of changes is exactly what we have releases for and
> > why rolling release models are not usable for production.
> 
> KDE 4.0 wasn't feature complete, I would call it at the very best Beta
> of KDE4. And yet you pushed it to *stable* release. Yes, during the
> development time, not as an update, but still have done it.

KDE 3.x was just EOL. Maybe upstream should wait with 4.0 release but we 
wouldn't have very nice and stable KDE 4.5 right now... It's open source, the 
way how it works... And as Kevin said - that's why we have two releases in the 
wild - one stable (F8), one progressive (F9). Otherwise we don't need more 
than one release out there (maintenance overhead).

> > * Version updates, the very ones you complain about, brought that 4.0 up
> > to 4.1 and later 4.2. I used F9 on my main machine from F8's EOL up to
> > F9's EOL. F9 with KDE 4.2 (and IMHO even 4.1) was rock solid, actually
> > one of the stablest Fedoras I used. (For example, F10 had issues with my
> > hardware's ALSA driver affecting PulseAudio, F11 with the graphics
> > driver.)
> 
> Well, the problem was that you pushed KDE 4.0 in the first place. Given
> the state of things, you had very *strong* reasons to update to KDE 4.1
> and 4.2. And yes, pulseaudio was IMHO pushed one release earlier than
> would be ideal as well...

And we did it - now we can slow down - we'd like to go with one major update 
for a Fedora release. Not only PA, the whole desktop stack ;-)

> > > I like that Fedora is bleeding edge in rawhide, recieves good deal of
> > > testing *before* release and is more or less conservative when it comes
> > > to important stuff after release. That way we can provide our users
> > > with *stable* but sufficiently modern stuff (in many areas even a few
> > > months ahead of other distros). And I think the new policy aligns
> > > pretty well with this.
> > 
> > KDE 4.0 was a result of "Fedora [being] bleeding edge in rawhide", this
> > was NOT pushed "after release". And it DID receive a "good deal of
> > testing *before* release". We were very hard at work fixing showstoppers
> > resp. getting them fixed upstream, it would have been much worse
> > otherwise! If you had compared the pre-4.0 prerelease which was
> > initially imported into Rawhide with the 4.0.3 + patches we shipped in
> > F9, you'd have noticed that there were worlds of differences in
> > reliability and glitch-freeness! A lot of the bugs that were fixed were
> > reported by Rawhide or kde-redhat unstable users, some of them were
> > fixed by Fedora developers.
> 
> Well, KDE 4.0 was an example of what should have been reverted during
> the stabilization pre-release phase (similar to what's now happening
> with gnome 3.0, although with gnome it's the upstream that is sane
> enough to not release it yet). It was not ready for prime time, IMHO.
> And as outlined above, I believe that 4.1 and 4.2 were necessary
> updates, precisely the type where there are strong reasons to push them
> despite the big number of changes (but require *a lot* of testing).

Yes - upstream decision. KDE upstream decided to go with 4.0... Gnome did not. 
We couldn't support old KDE. And I heard - Gnome guys now have big troubles - 
everyone is working on 3.0 and no one wants to take care about old one, even 
still official and supported one! But it's a decision. I don't want to rule all, 
we are not Microsoft :D

Jaroslav 

> > The NON-conservative updates are what brought 4.1 and 4.2 to the F9
> > release, resolving many of the complaints users had about 4.0.
> 
> No, given the situation, these were semi-conservative. They fixed
> zillions of regressions and bugs...
> 
> Martin