Why are 4.8.80 packages already out in the wild?

[Kevin Kofler]

On Monday 04 June 2012, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> I know building packages take time, that's why we give you early access,
> you should build the packages but you should not publish them before they
> are official.
> 
> If your packaging system does not support that maybe you need to refine
> your processes.

The most restrictive thing our build system (Koji) supports is to build the 
stuff in a side tag which does not hit the daily Rawhide. The packages would 
still be in Koji and the corresponding specfiles in our public git repositories 
("dist-git"), but the packages would NOT show up on FTP/HTTP (Rawhide and its 
mirrors). We cannot completely embargo Fedora packages. (For embargoed 
security advisories, the Fedora builds are only started once the embargo is 
lifted. But IMHO doing that for KDE SC packages would not be practical because 
of the time it takes to prepare them. There is also no strong need for an 
embargo, in particular, there are no security reasons for it.)

> Sorry, but no, this is a release team matters, since it's a privilege we,
> the releas team, are giving you, the packagers.
> 
> We need to decide under which terms those privileges happen. Letting the
> packagers decide decide which rights they get, would be be like politicians
> deciding the salary policitians get, a mess.

Sorry, but you have to listen to the needs of the packagers, not just give out 
a diktat. We are not out to arbitrarily grab power, we have genuine needs that 
have to be addressed. Arbitrarily deciding what we should do without listening 
to what we NEED to do is not going to work.

I will also remind you that KDE is as popular as it is today ONLY because it 
is widely packaged in distributions. Without packaging, KDE's userbase would 
be only an extremely tiny fraction of what it is now. I can also point you to 
several projects which have been forked into irrelevance because they ignored 
distributions' needs (see e.g. XFree86). Do not bite the hand that feeds you!

        Kevin Kofler