git migration, next steps

[Kevin Kofler]

On Friday 03 June 2011, Eric Hameleers wrote:
> I would feel very relieved if the old monolithic tarballs would stay
> as a download option.

+1

> Even if the release team maintains a series of scripts that makes a
> controlled checkout of monolithic tarballs possible for packagers, that
> would be an acceptible solution.

Well, I'd really prefer something which leads to perfectly reproducible 
output, ideally with the same checksum each time it is run. So IMHO starting 
from the split release tarballs (which could be automatically downloaded with 
e.g. wget) would be a better idea than starting directly from git.

> I expressed my thoughts on the split of kdeedu in an earlier post and
> coincidentally I fired up this discussion on my blog and the SLackware
> forum a few hours ago... Slackware will have to consider dropping KDE
> if we are confronted with source fragmentation.  We are a small team
> and can not accept the added burden of maintaining a fragmented KDE
> based desktop environment.

In Fedora, we're currently kludging multiple tarballs into single SRPMs to get 
4.6.80 built for Rawhide. Proceeding with the splits in Fedora would imply 
getting several new packages through review, which is going to take quite a 
while. But even the multi-tarball SRPM hack is a waste of time. :-(
I personally think we have better things to do with our time.

> Fragmenting the source tarballs may be only one step but seeing what happens
> in GNOME land, with Redhat employees forcibly pushing people into directions
> they do not want to be taken, I would welcome it if KDE would remain the
> sane, independent desktop enviroment, or even Software Collection, that I
> have come to love.

Please leave Red Hat out of this! Red Hat has absolutely nothing to do with 
these splits! In fact, the main Red Hat KDE packager (Than Ngo) has also 
expressed his unhappiness about the split tarballs in the Fedora KDE SIG 
discussions.

        Kevin Kofler