On Monday 09 June 2008, Ben Kevan wrote:
FWIW I consider KDE4:Stable to mean that it is the Stable release of KDE4 and not the Stable release for openSUSE itself.
Maybe a KDE4:Release or KDE4:SUSEStable or something.
Thats an interesting point, which makes me wonder why you suggest it. I'm interested in why you think that way. We've thought about this, and decided differently, for (among the) following reasons: - Even if KDE project upstream does a "stable" release, that doesn't mean that the openSUSE integration is stable. the packaging could have bugs that makes things not work, or there could be patches in there that make it crash. even if neither of that is the case, there could be integration issues, like a wrong/too old/too new/ version of some 3rd party library in the distribution which KDE depends on. As a result of that, things fail to work and are not stable, even though it is based on a "stable" release. - Even if we ship a version of KDE that upstream considers "unstable", we do it because we consider it stable. Stable in the sense of being usable, polished and not having major bugs, not stable in the sense of being feature complete or the latest state of the art. - Speaking from experience, and I am allowed to say that as a long time KDE contributor: Even things that are upstream released as "stable" often have major bugs. Thats the nature of open source projects: Release early, release often. Even stable releases are done that way. It also means that early "stable" releases might not really be more stable than the latest patch release of the previous feature branch. Upstream's stable definition is in the sense of "will not get any major new features, and from now on will only be bugfixed". As a matter of fact, even bugfixes introduce regressions sometimes, some of them being worse than the original bug. Another reason why upstream's stable definition doesn't really mean that it is more stable for the user. - Almost all of the bugs we fixed for KDE 4.0.x in openSUSE 11.0, they were also being found in KDE 4.1 branch, and we fixed them there as well. So, as part of our work of stabilizing and integrating a KDE release into our distribution, we're contributing back to make the next upstream stable release more stable. This is different from how upstream works: they use the unstable version, and sometimes backport easy fixes into the stable branch. Both approaches complement each other. So, thinking about it, we declare something stable that we (as in the openSUSE community) consider as being stable, because thats the additional value we provide over a LFS distribution. I think thats a fair decision. if you personally disagree with that because you believe that upstream has a better judgement about what is stable and what is not than openSUSE, then pick the "other" repository as your update source. We offer you the freedom to be able to do just that. Greetings, Dirk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org