Requested Moratorium on hard to build dependency bumps for KDE 5

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 3:48 AM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 06 June 2011 23:05:52 Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am requesting that a moratorium on dependency bumps for dependencies
>> which are "hard to build" be enacted. This would affect system wide
>> components which rely on root access and are heavily integrated into
>> the system. This would not affect things such as UPower or the like -
>> which aren't heavily integrated - but only heavily integrated things
>> such as the kernel, X and ALSA.
> For what modules do you want such a moratorium? Given that you mailed core-devel I
> assume the Plattform. There I am very sure that we do not need to expect an X12 before KDE
> 4.8 is released ;-) But given that you mention X I rather think you want to have a moratorium
> for the Workspaces. In that case please take the request to Plasma devel so that we can
> discuss raised requirements on a per-component base. A general "moratorium" just looks like
> a wonderful way to do bike-shedding.

The Moratorium would extend to all components of the KDE SC
distribution. Hence kde-core-devel.

>>
>> Over the past few months it has become increasingly hard to use a
>> distribution which isn't even 1 year old to build KDE trunk. Custom
>> patches, disabled features and compilation failures are fairly common,
>> and represent an extreme barrier to contribution.  This would only
>> affect releases after KDE 4.7.
> Personal opinion: I think it is impossible to want to run the latest software around an old stack.
> The overall FOSS world is rolling release with everything depending on everything. I cannot
> see why you want to change that with a moratorium.

Other than the very recent incompatibility in the "hard to build"
dependencies, a distribution which is less than 1 year old is fine to
build KDE. Ocassionally it may be needed to build something such as
Clucene from source (which is ok - clucene is not hard to build).

The components affected by the Moratorium - namely the Kernel, X and
ALSA interfaces are not easy to build. For those of us on non-rolling
release distributions the only way to usually get newer versions is a
complete system upgrade. That assumes that the latest release has that
- more conservative releases might not.

>
> Cheers
> Martin

Regards,
Ben