Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10

[Josh Boyer <jwboyer gmail com>]

On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 11:39:16AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 20:00 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Adam Williamson wrote:
>> > As I said, the particular code isn't the issue. We ship a kernel API. At
>> > present, we consider it fine to break that API in stable releases. This
>> > is not something that would be considered 'stable' in a traditional
>> > definition. The kernel's just an example, we do the same kind of
>> > non-stable updates all over the place. That's the issue I'm trying to
>> > talk about, not just the specific example I happened to mention. Please
>> > don't bog down in specifics.
>> 
>> Well, the specifics are that packages both within Fedora and in third-party 
>> repositories which depend on the bumped API usually get rebuilt (and patched 
>> if needed) fairly quickly, normally before the update even goes stable. Of 
>> course that's only possible for software which can be patched, which is just 
>> another example of how binary-only software is broken by design.
>
>But we're providing an operating system, not just a bunch of packages.
>What if some group's written their own kernel module for their own
>purposes, rolled it out to all their systems, and doesn't expect an
>official update to make them re-write it? Same question for KDE -

If they don't expect that, they have no idea what Fedora is or how it works.
We don't care about out of tree drivers.

>someone writes a tool for their group based on some KDE libraries,
>doesn't expect an update to come along and do a major KDE version bump
>and break some interface the tool relied on...reducing the question to
>'are all the packages we care about okay' is, again, excluding some use
>cases, i.e. defining an identity for Fedora.

You keep making strawman arguments that liken Fedora to something more akin
to RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.  We aren't either of those.

josh