I totally agree with this. I'm a late but dedicated convert to SUSE now, and back when I was starting out I most definitely would've ditched SUSE if I discovered that 3.5 packages weren't available at all; 3.5 had quite a few new touch-ups. 3.4 is most certainly old news. If I wanted to always compile KDE I'd be on Gentoo. I would've almost definitely asked what the heck someone was doing on 3.4 now if I heard about it. I've installed SUSE on about 5/6 computers here for friends, and the first thing I did was add the extra sources and upgrade KDE. Noticing that constantly on the dot (http://dot.kde.org) it said with every new package announcement that "X is released.... blah blah. Packages are available for SUSE and Kubuntu" (take the latest koffice announcement, for example), put my mind at rest that I wouldn't be running an ancient distro, even if it was still notorious for its polish and finish. I also idle a lot on IRC as of late (particularly after my exams finished), and I can vouch for all that was just said there with regard to user comments. The most recurring statement now is "what's up with the package management!!", where we generally end up recommending smart since it's an incredibly tedious business adding sources to yast and getting the package management up-and-running (bug #168804 #168935), followed by whether the latest KDE will be available. Fortunately Beineri announced quite early on in his blog that KDE 3.5.2 packs were going to be up in the next week or so, so once again that gave users some reassurance. Though tbh I'm not that concerned about using 3.5.1 as much, since it's a bugfix release, but I would be concerned if 3.5.3 wasn't released soon-ish from when it was officially released (which will be feature and bugfix; a one-off). Anyhow, I certainly hope that this trend of releasing new packages to the community will continue, as I find it invaluable. It would be nice if our friends over at GNOME could enjoy the same luxuries, I'm sure. Kind thoughts, Francis Giannaros (apokryphos). On Tuesday 23 May 2006 10:58, Pascal Bleser wrote:
jdd wrote:
Marcus Meissner wrote:
Unfortunately they then loose security updates when they do this.
Since supplementary contains usually the newest versions, this is not a real issue.
as always, if you begin this you _must_ continue upgrade any version. In a production system, this seems a very bad idea. so if people ask for this, the only answer is: don't do so.
I can understand one needs the very last kdenlive, because this is very new app, but what about Kde???
Come spend some time on IRC and see what people are actually asking for.
*Most if not almost everyone* over there wants and installs the latest KDE packages from KDE supplementary.
KDE 3.5.2 has a lot of bugfixes compared to 3.5.1.
As of SL 10.0, the difference is even bigger: 3.5.x is a *lot* faster than 3.4.2. Frankly, on 10.0, I'd recommend anyone to upgrade to 3.5.x (unless it's a server and you don't care about the desktop in the first place).
Answering "don't do so" would be stupid IMO. We do point them out to the fact that it's unsupported and merely provided by convenience, and that they won't get Online Updates for those packages, but as Marcus and I pointed out, the record until now has been very good wrt that (at least for KDE supplementary): it's always the latest version and I've even seen major bugfixes and security fixes being provided in that repository as well. People are very aware of those facts when they choose to upgrade to KDE 3.5.2 and it's not turning them off in any way.
I'm very aware of the "featuritis" syndrome, but as far as guerrilla marketing is concerned... You might not think that way, and neither do I nor most people on this list, but from what I've seen on IRC (and I'm on #suse and #opensuse every night), I think that many potential SUSE Linux converts who come asking for information about the distribution would likely rather use another (e.g. kubuntu) than staying with KDE 3.4.x. At least that was the case for SL 10.0. Correct me if I'm wrong but that's really my impression.
Before making assumptions in your black box, come out and look what users are asking for. They want it, and so do I, and we're fine using it. The fact that this works is of course mostly due to the fact that the KDE packagers in Nürnberg (Cornelius Schumacher and Stephan Binner) are fast and reactive to provide packages in the KDE supplementary repository. Unfortunately, and as discussed in another thread, that's not the case for the supplementary GNOME repository, and generally we (on IRC) recommend rather not to use it or, if so, with great care, as we've seen it blow up quite a few desktop setups. Hopefully it'll get better :)
cheers