[Kde-extra-gear] Re: Re: Re: Hello and let's start to bugging everyone with proposals :-)

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

Waldo Bastian wrote:
> A new release can be done every two weeks but a developer may be busy with
> other things. if he has bugfixes ready it's a disservice to everyone not
> to include those in a distribution, even if he hasn't made a release for
> it. Not including such fixes may mean for a developer that he will be
> getting bugreports for another 6 months for a bug that he already fixed.
> Dunno about you, but I find that annoying.
I find that annoying too, but I think as a final user which distribution
hasn't the package for a given app, which downloads the tarball... and
"what the.. it doesn't work! But my friend with Debian/Mandrake/Fedora have
it working right!".
If we establish a 'stable branch' for every app, and developers doesn't
bother to releases the fixes, only the distributions' packages will work
right, and final users which doesn't find the right package will found a
broken app.
Also Gentoo hasn't all the packages on this world, and if I need to compile
an app from scratch I usually start going to the app's website and download
the latest released tarball.

> It's much easier for everyone if there is a uniform way in which you, as
> application developer, can say "please use this version". In your case it
> would point to your latest release, for other applications it could point
> to their stable branch, if they so desire.
But this should be a thing which the apps should decide themselves. I also
think that, to allow the final users to have a 'working' version, in this
case they should use regular cvs snapshot in tarball to be packaged.

Also consider this: a distribution applies some patches to an app, and
maintain the same version number. Now you receive a bug report for a bug
you know is present in the cvs version but you thought it wasn't on the
released version, and was looking for it in the new code after the release.
If you don't know exactly what code was merged in that particular package,
you are in big trouble, from my point of view.

As a final note, I think that doing releases which should fix also some
minimal things can be simpler also to packagers (from the point of view of
my unofficial ebuilds I wrote for gentoo, it is much simpler), than need to
check for the cvs for all apps.

> As far as release notes go, don't you put those in CVS as well?
Yes, but having to look to release notes gets the need to do a
semi-interactive packagin, not a fully automated one which can require the
cvs uniformity.

Regards,
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
dgp85 at users.sourceforge.net - http://flameeyes.web.ctonet.it/