Dirk Müller wrote:
In one of my previous mails I and several other people have proposed to split openSUSE into a "common core" base that contains the newest hardware enablement and base system (compiler, kernel etc), and the addons, like the desktops. both can be released independently That actually sounds like a plan that can be implemented relatively easy yet still have a big effect. By releasing them independently the project can use the testers' time more efficiently (focussed testing) and also get in the news more frequently, because there would be more releases (though smaller ones) in a given time. E.g. 'base' and 'addons' releasing every 12 months would give us a new release every 6 months.
It was dismissed as "very hard to promote a new openSUSE release which only changes the base system" I would have liked that a while ago! I bought my scanner just a month after the driver was included in Sane and would have _loved_ to simply update to a newer base, but to keep all my apps. Instead, I compiled Sane myself. Certainly, other people have similar problems with new hardware that just got supported with the newest kernel/libwhatever.
it is a lot easier to promote a new desktop on a stable openSUSE base system (that was released and fixed already). That sounds good, especially for people with 'old' (>2 years) computers. If all my hardware is working correctly I really see no reason why I should install the latest kernel, low level libraries and so on. That would be like fixing something that is not broken. But a nice, new desktop on top of a stable base system would certainly be attractive.
One thing that would need to be investigated is to what extent base x can work together with addons y. Theoretically it should be easy to split the distro into hardware related base (kernel, cups, sane, X) and pure software addons (OpenOffice, KDE, Gnome, Firefox) that are not interdependent, but in practice it might turn out a little trickier. Regards nordi -- Spam protection: All mail to me that does not contain the string "suse" goes to /dev/null. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org