Pascal Bleser wrote:
[...] @Thomas H.: don't forget that we as a community are a very valuable asset for Novell, we're not less important from a strategic point of view than their developers (I mean if we were, they wouldn't have pushed openSUSE in the first place, wouldn't they).
Yes, sure. I mean otherwise it would not have made any sense for Novell to create an openSUSE project in the first place, and that's what I have mentioned before. It's part of their strategy.
Don't put us down as just being an annoyance for the developers. While we (as a community) are having a benefit from a much more direct communication and, hopefully, more and more collaboration between the people working on SUSE Linux, the opposite is very true as well. That's the whole point in the first place, it's a "win-win" situation.
Well, that's the ideal situation, right? I might have a more pragmatic point of view based on my daily experiences and I think that this is not (yet?) a realistic situation. It does not mean putting anybody down or something like that, it just means from my point of view avoiding to raise the expectations to a level that can never be reached. You were asking why the latest GNOME packages are not online on one of SUSE's FTP servers. Well, I think you got some answers now: people at Novell/SUSE seem to work on the SLED and SLES products and this has just a higher priority than other things, e.g. creating the latest GNOME packages and putting them into the supplementary tree (I got, of course, your point; this does not explain why the latest KDE packages are online). I think that perfectly supports all of what I have said before ;-) Please don't misunderstand me, I am not arguing against the openSUSE project, the community, the developers, etc. - I just try to explain why we have such a situation at the moment. Cheers, Th.