Stable vs. Release vs Devel Was: KDE update - no testing period?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 2/14/06, D Canfield <canfield at uindy.edu> wrote:
> Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> I'm sure I'm coming across in all of this as an argumentative sap.
Yes.. especially since you just said your proposal wasn't meant to be
taken seriously. If you want your opinions taken seriously...make
serious proposals.

> It's in Core.  How are end users supposed to know it's a second-class
> component?

At what point did I call it second-class. It is a fact that kde is not
highly integrated inside Fedora Core.  High integrated !=
second-class.  Because nothing from the KDE stack is needed for
firstboot KDE is secondclass in your mind?  The reality is many of the
fedora specific pieces are gtk and gnome software stack based...gnome
is deeply integrated into how Fedora Core is expected to work.. which
makes updating gnome much more sensitive.. KDE is not deeply
integrated into fedora specific software.  Delibrately taking freedoms
to change the description of the situation only helps to increase the
level of mis-communication and makes you appear to be argumentative.

But if you personally feel KDE is being treated as secondclass ...
feel free to work with the community members who want to move KDE to
Extras and maintain it there as a community effort.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnleashKDE

> But as an avid reader of fedora-devel for several months, I still don't
> usually know what to expect from the project.  It honestly feels as
> though people flip-flop between the arguments that "we have to do it > for the users" and "FC is a development project" interchangeably
> depending on what best justifies a course of action they want to take.

Your problem is you spend too much effort trying to summarize what
people are saying into parathetical that can't be attributed to a
single person instead of focusing on exact quotes that can be
attributed to specific individuals.  You need to stop doing that...
making up parathetical quotes only leads to miscommunication. If you
want to quote someone or something.. quote your reference specifically
and accurately... so that its clear as to you find confusing. The
paretheticals used in what you wrote above are constructs of your own
misunderstanding and not an accurate portrail of anything in the
fedora documentation or personal discussion.

There is no deep contradiction in Fedora's goals. The rate of
development across the open source software stack is rapid. Fedora
Core's goals invovlement incorporating those rapid upstream advances
into a usable general purpose operating system to a large number of
people on a time scale that is relevant to the upstream development
work.  Yes.. some of those relevant upstream development work involves
focusing on a desktop experience that is incrementally better with
every release... and as a result new desktop-user oriented development
work will be incorporated into Fedora.

Its a balance between staying relevant to upstream and shipping a
usable set of binaries... a balance that involves compromises at the
packaging level which prevent strict application of any packaging
policy that you care to try to define.  You aren't going to get a
strict policy definition because any such policy would be arbitrary.

-jef