Why are 4.8.80 packages already out in the wild?

[Kevin Kofler]

On Sunday 03 June 2012, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> I know, and that's an abuse of the privilege we give them having the
> packages before the release.

How does it hurt to have unreleased packages in an unreleased Fedora? We are 
NOT pushing packages of a new release to Fedora releases (not even their 
updates-testing repositories, let alone the stable updates) before the official 
announcement (and in this case, it's a beta release, so it will not go to the 
releases at all, builds for stable Fedora releases will only be available in 
the unofficial kde-unstable repository, if and as they are ready). We also 
ALWAYS respin the packages when tarballs are respun, to make sure our users 
always get the final tarballs (even when the changes do not affect us or have 
already been applied as patches).

> I'll try to get the release team to define what are the reasons and
> obligations of having the privilege of accessing packages on the ftp server
> before they are released to the broader public.

The reason is obvious: Creating and compiling packages takes time! The 
prereleased tarballs are the only way we can release packages anywhere near 
the official release day. And even then they're usually only finished a few days 
after your announcement, especially for beta releases, where the announcement 
has historically always been very quick (This is the first time it takes so 
long.). Even now I don't think we will be done with the packages on Monday. 
For example, new and newly split packages need to go through package review, 
this takes time.

> If you are interested in such a discussion i suggest you to subscribe to
> the release-team list.

Decisions which directly affect packagers MUST also be CCed to kde-packager. 
But I CCed release-team on this mail so everyone gets it.

        Kevin Kofler