On Sun, 2009-05-03 at 00:59 -0700, Dazed_75 wrote:
> Craig, I was not flaming anyone.  I was expressing the consistent
> belief I help through all my years AS a software developer and later
> as a manager of development.  Yes, that was in the world of commercial
> software which does differ from the world of FOSS.  Nevertheless it is
> a consistent position which has stood me, my teams, and the software
> we developed in good stead.  I am not about to change it or hide it
> just because I am now retired and out of that environment.
----
I didn't mean to suggest that you were flaming anyone but I have seen
this particular discussion (KDE 4) discussion pushed by less than a
handful of individuals on the Fedora list and there were several things
that became clear...

- The people complaining were not packaging anything.

- The people complaining were not subscribed to developer/packager mail
lists and thus were not are aware of what the discussions involved and
decisions taken.

- The people complaining didn't seem to understand the differentiation
between the 'stable' releases where things don't change as quickly and
the 'edge' releases where newly released packages are adopted in order
to get more people testing and contributing at least bug reports and
documentation.

I don't have to hang with the Ubuntu packagers to recognize that the
package decisions that they make for LTS releases are different than the
ones that they make for non-LTS releases. Ubuntu tends to blur the edges
of 'stable' and 'bleeding edge' whereas with Fedora, you pretty much
know you are getting 'bleeding edge'. With Ubuntu, if you want 'stable',
you need to stay with LTS releases.

As for the differing philosophies between commercial/proprietary
software and FOSS software, one can never lose track of the release
early & often philosophy of FOSS and the 'bleeding edge' releases which
are critical to development.

In terms of KDE 4, those discussions about feature regressions have been
out there for over a year now so it seems that someone commenting on it
now really hasn't done much research. Most of the feature regression has
been eliminated in KDE 4.2.x

I wanted to give some context to Alan's problem and his chosen
solution...which is a clear indication of how cool FOSS can be. That the
packagers released Amarok 2 with feature regressions knowing that the
device code still needed to be entirely re-written but someone
independently back ported the QT3 code from Amarok 1 to fill the gap in
the interim.

Craig


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