Op 02-12-09 18:57, Lubos Lunak schreef:
Hello,
it repeatedly happens that there is a change introduced in the distribution that affects others yet those are not told at all or too late to do something about it.
Speed of things makes these unfortunate consequenses and side-effects happen more easy... It will not be always known in front, unless a depsolver would be run against those changes, to make predictions of what could break... But on the other hand: making changes, forces to repair what breaks... Not saying that it is nice not to know upfront what has going to get fixed...
Examples would be the removal of X configuration including keyboard layout from YaST as a consequence of deprecating Sax2, meaning that it is now not possible to change keyboard layout for KDM/XDM, or the upgrade of PackageKit to a newer version that no longer had PolicyKit as a dependency but instead started requiring its newer and backwards incompatible version polkit-1, requiring rewritting KDE support from scratch (which is the reason why KDE in 11.2 uses polkit-gnome). In the first case, I don't remember that mentioned anywhere, in the latter case, the kupdateapplet maintainer was notified (where it didn't really matter) but not the KDE maintainers. Others could probably come up with their own examples.
Both consequenses are becoming visible while you wrote your thread. (as i was told to uninstall packagekit or break it, ignoring unfullfilled deps...sax2 same..as parts of yast...)
I'd prefer if such things didn't happen again, or at least if they were known in advance. And it even seems doable, because some changes already are announced, e.g. new gcc version, the switch to linking with --as-needed, etc.
Therefore I want to suggest that announcing important changes in the distribution that affect other components of the distribution becomes mandatory.
iirc, stephan anounced the departing of sax2 some months ago in this very list.... (probably not knowing what the exact consequences were at that moment...)
What would qualify for such a change is somewhat hard to specify exactly, but I'd hope using common sense to judge would do. For example "we remove support for X settings from YaST and require desktops to take care of these settings if necessary" or "we introduce new polkit-1, which is not backwards compatible to the old PolicyKit, and deprecate the old one" are clearly changes that should be announced. Something like "DHT support in KTorrent is now enabled/disabled" or "libjpeg is going to be upgraded from 6.2.0 to 6.2.1" is clearly of no interest, as long as it is not known to break other parts of the distribution - that would just create an unnecessary flood that nobody would follow.
The place for such announcements would be this list, with some specific subject to make it easier to spot them (and perhaps some more firm pointing to the right list would be needed for those who create noise, or something from http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2009-09/msg00354.html would be needed).
Comments?
As far as i remember there were always major changes in every new version, making updating a hell. Reason to make more clever update clients as zypper's development was a result of that... As these changes here, they were announced before the release of the last milestone of oS11.2, to be progressed in 12..... i guess there is time enough to deal with the consequences? (but, i am no authority, nor programmer, these are just plain thoughts....) -- Enjoy your time around, Oddball (M9.) (Now or never...) OS: Linux 2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop x86_64 Huidige gebruiker: oddball@AMD64x2-SFN1 Systeem: openSUSE 11.2 (x86_64) KDE: 4.3.1 (KDE 4.3.1) "release 6" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org