Requested Moratorium on hard to build dependency bumps for KDE 5

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Tuesday 07 June 2011 06:19:52 Ben Cooksley wrote:
> 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.
Sorry, but I think this is a very, very bad idea. I cannot judge what requirements e.g. kdepim 
needs, nor can kdepim developers decide what requirements the workspaces need. The 
decision on the requirements has to be with the developers who write the code.

Communicating such changes is as Thiago's mail shows of course required.
> 
> >>
> >> 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.
I think your examples are rather bad. I do not know about anything in KDE hard-depending on 
a specific Kernel, X or Alsa version. If at all those are optional dependencies, so why a 
moratorium?

Cheers
Martin
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