HEADS UP: KDE/Qt update intentions in Fedora 13 (RFC)

[Jaroslav Reznik]

On Tuesday, October 26, 2010 08:39:07 pm Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Peter Robinson (pbrobinson at gmail.com) said:
> > > Nokia managed to upgrade Qt to 4.7 in their Maemo distribution and it
> > > got pushed to all devices without causing any problems so far. Their
> > > standards for avoiding churn are pretty high and their update scheme
> > > is extremely conservative for stable releases. Nevertheless they
> > > updated Qt. But they have a pretty good reason for doing that
> > > (aligning with future versions of MeeGo and Symbian). So what does a
> > > F13 user gain from an upgrade? Is it worth the risks?
> > 
> > QT isn't the default toolkit in Maemo and it was only introduced at
> > all in the PR1.2 release which only came out around 3-4 months ago so
> > its not a core part of their UI experience on maemo.
> > 
> > So that's not really a good argument for upgrading it in F-13.
> 
> Also, I'd assume that Maemo explictily ships/supports a much smaller set
> of software than Fedora, so they can explicitly list all their dependencies
> that may need fixed.

Actually I would say more Qt apps are in Maemo repositories than in Fedora ones, 
that's really great, people are moving away from Gtk and switching to Qt! I hope 
we will see it in Fedora too soon, with more and more Qt-based apps!

Back to the topics.

Gnome Desktop spin is Qt free (unfortunately), same applies to other spins 
except Plasma Desktop spin. And there, we are pretty sure everything works as 
expected. So this change does not affect any default offering we explicitely 
ship/support.

And do not read this paragraph ;-)

You know I'm not a fan of banning updates but I'm really very conservative and 
very carefull about consequences. It's all about setting process to prepare high 
quality updates that makes user experience actually better. This involves 
communication (between developers, users, upstreams), testing, decision making 
etc. It's not easy task but that's our work. And I agree, we (as Fedora) failed 
here not a long time ago.

Jaroslav

> Bill

-- 
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

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