On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 13:48 +0200, Bart Braem wrote: > Does compiling KDE introduce so many bugs? I mean, let's be serious, all > other distributions have a stable 3.5.x now. Don't they experience all > those horrible bugs?
Compiling KDE doesn't introduce bugs. Compiling KDE with any combination of USE/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/GCC/Glibc/etc does. Remember that we're a from-source distribution. Guys like Debian or Red Hat just have to compile it *once* then they make a package of it, with exactly *one* set of options (USE), C(XX)FLAGS, gcc, glibc, etc. making their job infinitely easier. > Seriously, this is really becoming an issue. As I pointed out in a bug I > filed for a stable KDE (for which I apologize, I should have looked here > first), some people are leaving Gentoo because of this slow upgrade > process. Honestly, if they're leaving over something so minor, they're free to go. We're not a commercial distribution. We don't sell Gentoo. We're not concerned with market share. > The classical answer from devs is "it's ready when it's ready". From a user > point of view this is very, very vague. Please give users a more clear > explanation, this creates great frustration when looking at other > distributions. Because it's stable there. As I stated above, they have a *much* lower barrier of entry for making something stable than we do. We've tried making this explanation over and over again. The problem is that every single version of $package, people don't look at the last explanation and ask again... and again... and again... and again. It gets very old to answer the same question over and over again. The simple answer is really "when we don't have major showstopper bugs anymore". Again, remember that we have to support countless combinations from our users. Other distributions need to support only one. They can use forms of tricks to get it to compile that *one* time, including adding patches and other things that might not be suitable for a from-source distribution. > These are my 2 cents as a user. One that loves Gentoo. One that loves KDE. > One that's frustrated by the current situation. I am a CS so I know how > hard programming can be, don't get me wrong there. I do appreciate what you > guys do. But I can't understand why you do it this way right now. Quite simply, we don't want to give you crap. If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest, then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago, and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile or breaks badly in so many places. We would hear about how Gentoo sucks where they can't even test such a major application as KDE properly. We would have users leaving in droves. Now, we can't have both fast stabilization *and* actual stability, so we err on the side of caution. We don't like hearing complaints any more than anyone else, but we'd rather hear a few "why isn't KDE stable yet" questions than *everyone* saying we suck because KDE is broken. I hope that sums it up for you. By the way, this isn't just for KDE. This is how we do *every* package. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
