Harmless KDE feature upgrades - yeah right

[Ryan Rix]

On Thu 4 March 2010 12:14:55 pm Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> >  So please, Fedora KDE users - comment
> >  these changes!
> 
> I prefer to get the releases as KDE releases
> them, instead of having to wait... and wait...
> and wait...
> 
> I scanned the Stability Proposal document that
> had been linked. Here is what I think:
> 
> As I had expected, breaking up the monolithic
> packages into individual packages is a whole lot
> of unnecessary work. Better to provide releases
> as they occur, than to waste time unnecessarily
> breaking down the monolithic packages. To what
> end and benefit? Who, nowadays, doesn't have at
> least one hard drive of at least 80-100GB, likely
> more (I have 3 drives, 2x300GB and1x200GB, the
> latter an old pata that will eventually get
> phased out, and I actually use only about 80GB
> for my own archives! That's a lot of space to
> spare).

If we want to consider shipping a KDE Netbook spin for Fedora 14 (which has 
been thrown out as an idea by a few of us in the SIG as a good idea, and is 
indeed being discussed right now :) ) breaking the packages up would be a Good 
Thing as we could create a smaller, more targeted spin. (imo, others seem to 
disagree) Not everyone has a RealBigHarddrive, unfortunately.

> 
> I think it is unnecessary to provide the latest
> releases for any releases except the current and
> rawhide. If people don't bother to upgrade to the
> current release, then they obviously don't care
> to run a cutting edge system, so there is no
> point in providing it at the expense of a whole
> lot of work. It only takes an evening to download
> a live cd, install it, and do some rudimentary
> configurations. The rest can be achieved as one
> actually uses the system, so there is no excuse
> for not running the latest release. Considering
> that a lot of the work is done by volunteers (or
> are you, all you redhat/fedora people?), this is
> a fabulous system all for free and not even money
> can purchase anything better.
> 
> Yes, it is true that KDE 4 has matured immensely
> and it truly is difficult to notice all of the
> improvements and bug fixes. Nevertheless, I
> personally do enjoy finding the occasional
> irritating quirk disappear after a yum update.
> 
> Definitely, old releases should receive only the
> necessary bug fixes, not new features. This is a
> terrible waste of manpower.

The problem is that there _aren't_ bug fixes for these old releases. When 4.x 
comes out, upstream pretty much drops development on 4.x-1 except for security 
issues which are backported from 4.x. This leaves us in the tough position of 
"oh crap, there's $importantfix, in 4.x, but we either need to *spend the 
manpower* to backport it ourselves, or ship buggy/security-issue-plagued 
software. :( 
As it is, for most of Fn-1 updates, at least in the sig, to 4.x are simple and 
rarely need Fn-1 specific fixes.

> Fedora advertises and distinguishes itself from
> other distros by being cutting edge. This is what
> I expect (although I would not likely jump ship,
> were the aforementioned changes implemented), as
> there is no other distro offering cutting edge
> and stability and quality, as fedora does.
> 
> To save man-hours, it might be better to scrap
> kde-redhat and just stick to updates and updates-
> testing. I would enable updates-testing (and
> sometimes I even pull something off koji
> manually), but many would stick to the safer
> route of just enabling updates.

Again, this would actually take _more_ manpower in the end, if we had QA do 
the testing instead of kde-redhat users. kde-redhat basically ships rawhide 
built for Fn, which is a Good Thing, because it gives the upcoming 
updates/updates-testing release a bunch more testing than sticking it only in 
rawhide would deliver. There's little manpower involved in Rex taking 
rawhide's spec file and sources, throwing them in kde-redhat's mock and 
letting it run (by all means, correct me if I'm wrong, Rex!) and the testing 
is invaluable.

> It is a waste of time for a cutting edge distro
> to support old versions.
> 
> I can say, that aside from a very rare scare for
> a night, I have had no reason not to be ecstatic
> about this distro and the benefits of running it.
> No other distro offers what fedora offers.
> 
> The musings of an avid fedora user.

The ramblings of an avid fedora user :)
Ryan

-- 
Ryan Rix
== http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com | http://rix.si/ ==
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20100304/bd153d4a/attachment.bin