KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software [LWN.net]

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Feb 1, 2009 7:49 UTC (Sun) by GregMartyn (subscriber, #52300)
Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

I think it's time that we acknowledged that the biggest reason that "people don't test when it's alpha or even beta" is because it is too hard to try out betas.

Our package managers have ingrained the idea of "latest is greatest," but that breaks down when trying out beta software. Sure, I can try out the latest from rawhide (or unstable, or its distro-specific equivalent), but then my current version is removed, and multiple beta dependencies are installed. My system is either permanently unstable (from constantly fetching the latest betas), or frozen in time with no updates until all the betas become full stable releases.

Switching between beta and the release version is very difficult -- having multiple versions of the same software is rarely well supported. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of downgrading software.

(Log in to post comments)

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Feb 1, 2009 18:25 UTC (Sun) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

But it is not hard at all to try out betas. There have been KDE4 vm's
available for download that are updated regularly:
http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html. People didn't
use that. There have been regular binary snapshot packages for many
distributions, easy to install on a vm or any old box you might have had
lying around. People didn't do that. There has been kde-svn build
(http://kdesvn-build.kde.org/) which makes it easy to keep up to date to
the minute. All these options have been widely advertised.

Saying "it's too hard to try out betas" is pure poppycock.

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Feb 1, 2009 19:27 UTC (Sun) by GregMartyn (subscriber, #52300) [Link]

I can't help but notice that you were unable to address the package manager issues raised by my post.

Compiling software from source (kdesvn-build) is not easy. This happens to be the route I chose through the KDE4 release cycle, and can confidently say that it is not something most end users would do.

Running beta software in a VM (kde4daily) is not convenient. Do you copy all the files you want to work on to the VM? Do you set up a shared directory? Ugh. It also doesn't help spot problems like what we saw with KDE4 and the Nvidia binary driver.

Finally, binary snapshot packages have the problems detailed in my previous post.

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Feb 3, 2009 0:32 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]

Gentoo gets this right fairly well. You can co-install different versions of kde, and there are live ebuilds that download, compile and install packages from svn that are just as integrated as the standard releases. I've followed the development of kde from about October of 2007 on with this method without a whole lot of pain.