Releases of KDE and Gnome?

Releases of KDE and Gnome?

Posted Jun 7, 2007 15:32 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
Parent article: Looking forward to Fedora 8

It might be a good thing to not be lined up with a schedule where a release of KDE and/or GNOME happen shortly before a release of Fedora. I know the Fedora developers keep track of the pre-releases but trying to cram the production versions of KDE and/or GNOME in near the tail end of a Fedora release sounds a bit stressful in itself.

There are two other factors to take into account:

1) The 6 months release cycle means you won't have to wait long for the next one.

2) Fedora has historically done a fairly good job of updating releases of KDE during a Fedora releases' lifecycle. I'm not sure the same is true for GNOME. I'm also not sure if that is a good idea or not but I personally have enjoyed the KDE minor version updates as standard Fedora package updates. I don't know if this will continue or not, but I hope so.

Regarding the packaging issue... and the package guidelines... it is definitely a good idea to have guidelines for packaging. I haven't looked at the lengthy steps you mentioned... and sure... if those could be streamlined without losing any quality... go for it... the the simple truth is that the perceived deficiency of RPM (and/or up2date/yum) really hasn't been because of real technical issues in the packaging system. No, I believe it is clear that the problem has been in sub-standard packaging standards... and problems with packages themselves rather than the packaging system... and that remedy was indeed to be found in a more rigid set of packaging standards.

It is easy for me as an end-user (non-developer and non-packager) to want higher standards and goals in packaging guidelines... but yeah, I can certainly understand the grumbling among the former Extras packagers. Hey, it might be painful and time consuming to get going... but once you get used to it, hopefully the benefits will outweigh the annoyances.

As I understand it, Debian has some extensive packaging guidelines as well... and it hasn't seemed to hinder their package numbers now has it? :) I won't be so bold as to say that the Debian developers are obviously more commited than the former Fedora Extras packagers... but some might jump to that conclusion. But then again, the development cycle of Debian hasn't been so rapid either.

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