And now, the "general problem": I just don't see ex-Ximian people involved into openSUSE at all. I see quite a few of them involved in some way or other, but when the By "involved", I meant being on this mailing-list and/or on opensuse-packaging. Besides a few of them being aggregated on http://planetsuse.org, I don't think I've seen them directly involved in any way.
They are *developers*, that should be developing and not bothered with all this noise. Developing really good stuff, which they do, is hard work and requires concentrated effort.
The issue is that GNOME 2.14 is not available in GNOME supplementary, neither for 10.1 nor for 10.0. KDE 3.5.2 has been released roughly at around the same time (more or less) and has been available in KDE supplementary for quite some time (at least for 10.0 - builds for 10.1 have been provided a week after 10.1 release). Actually, KDE 3.5.2 was released March 28, and GNOME 2.14 was on March 15.
Well, I'm a long time GNOME user. I use GNOME 10+ hours a day... and I just don't care that much about 2.12 vs. 2.14 vs. whatever. It will show up on my desktop/laptop at some point, but the current GNOME easily has the features required to get my work done. Maybe GNOME people are just lest prone to version mania.
What I can't understand is that with acquiring Ximian, you'd expect Novell to be _the_ GNOME driver (as Ximian was). Sure, I guess a good part of the Ximian developers who were working on GNOME are now busy with other tasks (e.g. NetworkManager and Zen), but still. It just doesn't make any sense to me that the company that has some if not most of the lead developers of GNOME (as well as the GNOME project lead) on its payroll does not have up-to-date GNOME packages for its very own Linux distribution.
Maybe the focus of the *distribution* is just to provide a solid and will integrated desktop environment, which the provided version of GNOME provides?
So either my assumptions are wrong and the former Ximian staff is not involved in GNOME development any more, or providing an up-to-date GNOME is extremely low priority at Novell and those folks are using Ubuntu or Fedora Core on their workstations.
Who cares what they use.
Now that 10.1 is out, I suspect we can expect to see 2.14 or 2.15 appear in supplementary (can I just say, I'd prefer to see 2.14, at least at first - good to have something mostly stable in there, but 2.15 in Factory would be good, we can aim to have 2.16 in 10.2). GNOME 2.14 has been released March 15, 2 months ago.
Just two months ago? In a corporate environment it is freakin' *RARE* to see ANY package updated/installed withing 2 months of its release.