Jeff Spaleta wrote:
And that all makes sense. My point is that after the software is frozen and released, it seems to the revert back into an open development tree, with no rules as to what gets released except "try not to break stuff."What is the incentive to make sure ALL the peices integrate together nicely at any given point in time.. unless there are set release dates to shoot for? A release schedule drives integration efforts to make sure all the pieces work together. You can't just throw chunks of the development tree over the fence into stable, you have to deal with integration issues across subcomponents by having freeze points.
Not at all. My "proposal" about the rolling releases was not meant to be taken seriously. I was trying to illustrate a point that when some people talk about trying to stabilize things and make life easier on the users, there is always someone waiting to proclaim that "Fedora is an agressive developer's release and things break. Deal with it or switch distributions." (And that's why I included the "rhetoric" about actual users not being important to FC in my previous message.)Do you really want to see a full rebuild of ALL packages in your "stable" tree because a new compiler landed in the stable tree forcing everyone in the userbase to download and install the ENTIRE installed packageset as updates? Do you really want to see users who have been relying on how the fc4 styled automounting worked via hal policy files and fstab-sync.. suddenly find the automounting working in a completely different way regardless of desktop because the new halstuff moved into your "stable" tree?
It's in Core. How are end users supposed to know it's a second-class component? Or is this one of the times that end users just have to deal with things changing and leave if they don't like it? (FWIW, I'm not a KDE user, so my interest is only in improving FC's policies and procedures.)In the large scale view of Fedora Core.. KDE is NOT a critical subcomponent of the fedora software stack. It is OPTIONAL and how it is treated in terms of updates compared to other much more integratedcomponents can not be fairly compared.
I'm sure I'm coming across in all of this as an argumentative sap. But as an avid reader of fedora-devel for several months, I still don't usually know what to expect from the project. It honestly feels as though people flip-flop between the arguments that "we have to do it for the users" and "FC is a development project" interchangeably depending on what best justifies a course of action they want to take. And the truth is that I don't care which route the project takes. I just wish some of the goals and plans would be better defined, documented, and followed.
DC