KDE vs. GNOME on F10

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Thu Aug 6 06:05:26 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 05:42 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > If we are - or _want to be_ - that kind of a distribution, we have to
> > provide a stable update set so we can stop telling people who just want
> > a distro to run Aunt Flo's desktop or their webserver or whatever on to
> > run CentOS or Ubuntu instead. If, however, we really don't care about
> > that kind of usage scenario and instead we want to focus only on being a
> > kind of project for the prototyping of systems that will eventually
> > _become_ components of that kind of generally usable operating system -
> > which to my mind is more or less the status at the moment - it doesn't
> > make any sense to provide a stable update set, it's not serving any real
> > purpose, and it'd just be a waste of effort.
> 
> Actually, I think our KDE updates are very much beneficial even to "Aunt 
> Flo" type users. We wouldn't push them out if we thought otherwise.

At this point you're getting down to update theory, which is a deeply
unexciting area to most people, I suspect ;)

The problem with that approach is that, in the conventional approach to
updates, the key factor is _continuity_. You don't change behaviour or
risk regressions. If an update fixes ten bugs but changes the behaviour
of some component people see every day - which is a fairly accurate
description of both KDE and GNOME point releases - it's not appropriate
to be an update, in this theory, because it means the updated product is
breaking the expectations of the the initial release. What your frazzled
sysadmin cares about most is that things work on Tuesday the same way
they did on Monday - even if that just means they're broken in the same
way. If you can fix something without changing the fundamental behaviour
of the system, great, but that's all.

As I said, I'm not arguing in favour of or against any particular
position. I'm just pointing out the angles here. There is a conventional
approach to updates that many distributions use, and that some types of
user expect and would like in any distribution they use. We can choose
not to do this, and it's fine, I just want it to be clear where the
'edges' are.

Right now, if you ask around in the conventional places - Fedora forums,
Linuxquestions, distrowatch, IRC, places like that - people will tell
you that, if what you want is a conventional stable operating system to
run your servers or whatever on, that doesn't change from day to day,
don't run Fedora, run CentOS (or Ubuntu or Debian or SUSE or...whatever
they like). If we're happy with that, that's great. But it is worth
being aware exactly what the status quo is. It seems like our current
policy is more de facto than the result of any reasoned decision.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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