Juha Tuomala wrote:
On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> You're distorting the Fedora model to accommodate KDE roadmaps.
>
> No, this goes far beyond KDE. KDE roadmaps are just one strong argument
> for doing things this way. Many more packages benefit or would benefit
> from version upgrades during a release.
In my undestanding, KDE makes new feature releases (b releases) and
bug fix releases (c releases), where versions are kde-a.b.c.
How is that 'one strong argument for doing things this way' in
fedora where new features are added into new Fn releases?
The strong argument is that KDE and Fedora release cycles are not in sync
and our users would thus have to wait months for the new KDE.
I talked to rdieter about this and said that part of the problem
is that not all of the bug fixes end to bugfix releases and would
be thus ommitted from stable fedora releases. Being a pure KDE
upstream problem, it should be solved there and would certainly
get more focus if fedora would start enforcing it.
I doubt it. Other distros are already much more conservative than we are,
that doesn't prevent this from happening. So that's another argument for the
upgrades.
In fact, KDE upstream doesn't even provide any further bugfix releases for
the old branch after releasing the new one, they just don't have the
resources to do that. So upgrading is the only way to continue picking up
fixes.
It's a compromise. Under that proposal, we'd push only one KDE upgrade per
release instead of 2, and you'd have to upgrade to the latest released
Fedora to get the latest KDE. (And FWIW, I prefer the current system where
we also upgrade the previous Fedora, for the reasons outlined in that
proposal under "The cons" – and yes, I know the points about KDE 4.4 and Qt
4.6 are outdated.)
Kevin Kofler