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

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Feb 1, 2009 18:25 UTC (Sun) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software by GregMartyn
Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

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.

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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.