James Antill wrote:
> Mike didn't say that, Mike said that if a user was intentionally not
> updating to Fedora 12 due to the newer KDE ... you've just removed that
> choice from them. And for no real gain, as anyone who wanted to the KDE
> update could easily move to Fedora 12 to get it.
That argument sorta holds for the second KDE upgrade in the release cycle,
but not for the first. If I want 4.4.0 now, there's no F13 to upgrade to,
it's not even in alpha yet. KDE schedules aren't aligned to Fedora
schedules.
The usefulness of the second update in the cycle is more debatable and in
fact some people in KDE SIG are considering to stop doing that one. My
arguments against that (i.e. in favor of keeping the second update) are:
* Users will feel treated like second-class citizens. Either a release is
supported or it's not, I don't like this "half-supported" state.
* KDE doesn't ship bugfix releases from the old branch after the new branch
is released, so we'd either have to backport all those patches ourselves,
which doesn't look feasible to me (it would require massive manpower which
frankly NO distro has, I'm really not looking forward to spending day and
night on backporting KDE bugfixes!) or our users would be stuck with no more
bugfixes, which frankly looks like a degraded experience to me (see the
point about "second-class citizens" above).
* We'd have to maintain the old and new release at the same time, leading to
extra work. (The more bugfixes we backport, the more work. Security only
would be trivial, but the worst user experience. Anything better requires
extra work as opposed to just building the same thing for the 2 supported
releases at the same time.)
> But after changing the question to one you think you do better at, you
> are still wrong. The current state of play is (taking a random kde
> example):
>
> kdeutils F11 GA 4.2.2-4.fc11
> kdeutils F11 Updates 4.4.0-1.fc11
> kdeutils F12 GA 4.3.2-1.fc12
> kdeutils F12 Updates 4.4.0-1.fc12
>
> ...so if someone tries to update from F11 (with updates) using an F12 GA
> release DVD, it'll be an older version and I very much doubt you've
> tested how well that works.
Upgrading using the DVD is broken by design and just cannot work. It goes
far beyond KDE, we also do version upgrades for things like security fixes.
For F10 to F11, you'd even end up with a broken yum when upgrading using the
DVD! And for KDE, it'd still break even if we pushed only 4.3.x bugfix
releases. We'd have had to stick to 4.2.x to make that work, and that'd
really suck as explained in the first paragraph. (And it wouldn't solve the
problem for all the other version upgrades anyway, and doing away with those
is no option, it'd require us to always backport bug and security fixes
which goes very much against our "follow upstream" policy.) The DVD needs to
be fixed to pull in the updates repository during upgrades, which it
currently doesn't support (and it shouldn't even be optional, but mandatory,
because the upgrade option is completely useless without that).
IMHO the DVD should be discontinued entirely. Fresh installs should use the
live CDs, upgrades should use preupgrade or plain "yum upgrade". Those are
the only options that work. (Fresh installing from the DVD sucks because the
package selection is not desktop-environment-aware.) But if the DVD is to be
kept, it ought to be fixed:
* upgrades MUST include the updates repository,
* fresh installs need a desktop selection screen like in openSUSE and then
comps needs to be conditionalized based on the desktop, so that if you
select that "Graphical Internet" group, you get Firefox (and/or Epiphany)
and Evolution if you picked GNOME, Konqueror (kdebase) and kdepim if you
picked KDE, lynx and mutt if you picked no desktop (or "Graphical Internet"
could even be hidden entirely in favor of "Text-based Internet" in that
case) etc.
Until/unless that happens, it's completely illusory to try to support the
DVD. All it does is provide a very substandard and broken experience to our
users.
> Now sure, Fedora is forced to do this sometimes because we don't have
> the manpower to backport all fixes ...
As I said, we definitely don't have the manpower to backport all KDE
bugfixes and I really don't think any distro in the world does.
> but there's a _big_ difference between being forced to do it some of the
> time and guaranteeing that the firehose breaks it _every_ release for
> _every_ user.
But our policy is to stay close to upstream and we even recommend upgrading
rather than backporting for security fixes.
Kevin Kofler
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