[gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[m h]

Subject says it all.

This isn't meant as flamebait.  I'm running stable on my laptop and
unstable on my desktop.  It seems like most KDE release get better
over time, so I'm just wondering what the process is with KDE?

thanks

-matt

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Stephen P. Becker]

m h wrote:
> Subject says it all.
> 
> This isn't meant as flamebait.  I'm running stable on my laptop and
> unstable on my desktop.  It seems like most KDE release get better
> over time, so I'm just wondering what the process is with KDE?
> 

Whether it is meant to be flamebait or not is irrelevant.  This list
isn't for whining about (the lack of) stable keywords for any particular
ebuild or set of ebuilds.

-Steve
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Aron Griffis]

Stephen P. Becker wrote:  [Mon Apr 03 2006, 07:11:12PM EDT]
> Whether it is meant to be flamebait or not is irrelevant.  This list
> isn't for whining about (the lack of) stable keywords for any
> particular ebuild or set of ebuilds.

Making this kind of statement without pointing the poster to the
appropriate place (and I'm curious too) surely isn't helping anybody.
Where do you suggest procedural questions be asked?

Aron
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Kari Hazzard]

This is Gentoo. We have a reputation of good community support to maintain 
here. You're not helping that reputation by being mean to people who ask 
legitimate questions. The issue that the question may have been sent to the 
wrong list is irrelevant. RTFM is never the right answer to a question.

Kari Hazzard

On Monday 03 April 2006 11:11 pm, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> Whether it is meant to be flamebait or not is irrelevant.  This list
> isn't for whining about (the lack of) stable keywords for any particular
> ebuild or set of ebuilds.
>
> -Steve
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Stephen P. Becker]

Kari Hazzard wrote:
> This is Gentoo. We have a reputation of good community support to maintain 
> here. You're not helping that reputation by being mean to people who ask 
> legitimate questions. The issue that the question may have been sent to the 
> wrong list is irrelevant. RTFM is never the right answer to a question.

I fail to see how pointing out a post was offtopic is mean.  Rather, it
will save that individual (and hopefully others) from making the same
mistake in the future.

Also, RTFM is absolutely the right answer more often than not.
Otherwise, what is the point of having TFM in the first place?  The
amusement of those who spent a lot of time and effort writing it?

-Steve
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[lnxg33k]

Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> I fail to see how pointing out a post was offtopic is mean.  Rather, it
> will save that individual (and hopefully others) from making the same
> mistake in the future.
>
> Also, RTFM is absolutely the right answer more often than not.
> Otherwise, what is the point of having TFM in the first place?  The
> amusement of those who spent a lot of time and effort writing it?

RTFM shouldn't be an answer in and of itself. Pointing out which FM would help. 
Particular sections to note would be great help too considering many FM are 
really FLarge.

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jason S]

--- lnxg33k <lnxg33k@gmail.com> wrote:

> RTFM shouldn't be an answer in and of itself.
> Pointing out which FM would help. 
> Particular sections to note would be great help too
> considering many FM are 
> really FLarge.

Good response. Saying RTFM doesn't require any
know-how, and it's actually more of a one-up-manship.

In fact instead of having a ml, when someone tries to
join the ml just have it send a RTFM, RTFF, RTFW
email. Would save everyone alot of time and be really
helpful. :p

Yeah, the arrogance of it really annoys me.

__________________________________________________
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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Kari Hazzard]

On Tuesday 04 April 2006 2:28 am, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> I fail to see how pointing out a post was offtopic is mean.  Rather, it
> will save that individual (and hopefully others) from making the same
> mistake in the future.

Then refer the poster to the correct place to send such inquiries. That is the 
logical way to deal with OT messages. You failed to do this, and instead 
offered a derrogatory message contributing absolutely nothing positive.

>
> Also, RTFM is absolutely the right answer more often than not.
> Otherwise, what is the point of having TFM in the first place?  The
> amusement of those who spent a lot of time and effort writing it?
>
> -Steve

TFM exists to be read, yes, but not everyone reads TFM. You are a developer. 
That's great, I'm sure you can do a lot of things with Gentoo that I'd be 
completely dumbfounded about, being myself not a developer.

If we're going to say that Gentoo is a valid and worthwhile operating system, 
we need to support that idea by maintaining our image as a group of people, 
both users and developers. The Gentoo philosophy of continual growth and 
improvement doesn't just apply to software. It applies to everyone on this 
list, how they conduct themselves, how they behave.

I suggest patching your question-answering skills in light of this bug. :)

Kari Hazzard
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Stephen P. Becker]

Kari Hazzard wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 April 2006 2:28 am, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
>> I fail to see how pointing out a post was offtopic is mean.  Rather, it
>> will save that individual (and hopefully others) from making the same
>> mistake in the future.
> 
> Then refer the poster to the correct place to send such inquiries. That is the 
> logical way to deal with OT messages. You failed to do this, and instead 
> offered a derrogatory message contributing absolutely nothing positive.

I hate to break it to you, but there really is no such place for such
queries.  We generally consider it rude when users whine about stable
keywording.  Therefore, I don't feel bad about a short response.


>> Also, RTFM is absolutely the right answer more often than not.
>> Otherwise, what is the point of having TFM in the first place?  The
>> amusement of those who spent a lot of time and effort writing it?
>>
>> -Steve
> 
> TFM exists to be read, yes, but not everyone reads TFM. You are a developer. 
> That's great, I'm sure you can do a lot of things with Gentoo that I'd be 
> completely dumbfounded about, being myself not a developer.

Not really, I can only do what I do because I read stuff.  Anybody else
can easily do the same.


> If we're going to say that Gentoo is a valid and worthwhile operating system, 
> we need to support that idea by maintaining our image as a group of people, 
> both users and developers. The Gentoo philosophy of continual growth and 
> improvement doesn't just apply to software. It applies to everyone on this 
> list, how they conduct themselves, how they behave.
> 
> I suggest patching your question-answering skills in light of this bug. :)

I would like to point out that it was you who flamed me for apparently
saying RTFM, when in fact if you read my original email, I did nothing
of the sort.  I merely pointed out what should have been clear to anyone
that signed up for this list, that it is not for whining about arch
keywording.  Sounds like you had an agenda to bitch about and found my
email to be convenient.  In other words, you have no point.

-Steve


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Kari Hazzard]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 11:35 am, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> I hate to break it to you, but there really is no such place for such
> queries.  We generally consider it rude when users whine about stable
> keywording.  Therefore, I don't feel bad about a short response.

If questions on a particular topic get asked frequently, and indeed they 
do, maybe there should be an official place to ask them. Saying 
something along the lines of "this is the wrong place to ask, there is 
no right place, so don't ask at all" to a customer would get any 
employee of any business fired or given a stern warning instantly. It 
doesn't matter if the person is customer support, a clerk, a developer, 
management or whatever. It's unbecoming and does not promote a positive 
image.

> Not really, I can only do what I do because I read stuff.  Anybody else 
> can easily do the same.

That makes the assumption everyone has the same amount of knowledge you 
did when you started using Gentoo.

I don't know C#, for example. As a result, any attempt to program with 
Mono would be futile and result in failure.

> I would like to point out that it was you who flamed me for apparently
> saying RTFM, when in fact if you read my original email, I did nothing
> of the sort.

You gave a logical RTFM. You're being literal with words when the 
meaning of what you said should be fairly clear. You didn't want to 
answer the question, so you flamed the person who asked instead of 
answering or defering to a more helpful individual.

> I merely pointed out what should have been clear to anyone
> that signed up for this list, that it is not for whining about arch
> keywording.

Not everyone is like you. There are all sorts of different people out 
there who process information in a lot of different ways. Without a 
stated correct place for asking questions about keywording, it wouldn't 
be hard to rationalise that the proper place is the dev mailing list.

You say it should be obvious like it's fact. Not everything is obvious 
to everyone--Not everyone is a Steve or Stephanie. They may interpret 
conveyed information in different ways and the ambiguity does not help 
at all.

There's a reason devs rarely answer questions. Devs should do what they 
do best, code and fix problems according to SE principles. If you really 
want to answer questions, go ahead, but if you don't want to be helpful, 
don't say anything. Someone else who does want to will chime in with a 
helpful response.

> Sounds like you had an agenda to bitch about and found my
> email to be convenient.  In other words, you have no point.
>
> -Steve

I do have an agenda. I won't deny that. I think the Gentoo philosophy is 
essentially perfect, both as a development philosophy and also as an 
operational philosophy. When I see a dev who violates this philosophy 
with the way they behave, I am inclined to call them on it.
Kari Hazzard
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Stephen P. Becker]

Kari Hazzard wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 11:35 am, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
>> I hate to break it to you, but there really is no such place for such
>> queries.  We generally consider it rude when users whine about stable
>> keywording.  Therefore, I don't feel bad about a short response.
> 
> If questions on a particular topic get asked frequently, and indeed they
> do, maybe there should be an official place to ask them. Saying
> something along the lines of "this is the wrong place to ask, there is
> no right place, so don't ask at all" to a customer would get any
> employee of any business fired or given a stern warning instantly. It
> doesn't matter if the person is customer support, a clerk, a developer,
> management or whatever. It's unbecoming and does not promote a positive
> image.

If we had an official place where people could complain about ebuilds
not being stabilized, then I have a feeling most developers would avoid
it like the plague.  Stuff like this is along the same lines as the
"bump it!!!eleventy-one11!11" bugs which get filed the minute there is a
new release of some program.  We tend to hate that, and there isn't much
that could be done other than closing them with prejudice.


>> Not really, I can only do what I do because I read stuff.  Anybody
>> else can easily do the same.
> 
> That makes the assumption everyone has the same amount of knowledge you
> did when you started using Gentoo.
> 
> I don't know C#, for example. As a result, any attempt to program with
> Mono would be futile and result in failure.

So?  The only language which I know is fortran, and then I always have
to look at my fortran references when I want to write a new program.
Otherwise, I know just enough about bash syntax to get around ebuilds,
and even then I always look at other ebuilds or references for examples
when I need to do anything.  The point here is that anybody with any
sort of training in some sort of computer related field probably knows a
hell of a lot more than me by default.  Yet, I'm perfectly capable of
doing Gentoo development by RTFM.


>> I would like to point out that it was you who flamed me for apparently
>> saying RTFM, when in fact if you read my original email, I did nothing
>> of the sort.
> 
> You gave a logical RTFM. You're being literal with words when the
> meaning of what you said should be fairly clear. You didn't want to
> answer the question, so you flamed the person who asked instead of
> answering or defering to a more helpful individual.

Not really.  I should have actually pointed out that there is no (good)
place for such queries originally, but I was doing about 10 things at
once, and just sent the typical "don't send offtopic stuff to the
gentoo-dev list" reply.  Look back through the archives...this is pretty
standard.


>> I merely pointed out what should have been clear to anyone
>> that signed up for this list, that it is not for whining about arch
>> keywording.
> 
> Not everyone is like you. There are all sorts of different people out
> there who process information in a lot of different ways. Without a
> stated correct place for asking questions about keywording, it wouldn't
> be hard to rationalise that the proper place is the dev mailing list.

Except that it isn't the proper place.  It is for discussion of
technical matters concerning the development of Gentoo.  The closest
place that might be sort of on-topic is the gentoo-desktop list, but I
generally don't recommend that list because it seems like nobody bothers
to answer questions there for the most part.  I think the problem is
that the RightPeople(TM) (meaning all the members of the teams for each
desktop herd) probably aren't subscribed there.


> You say it should be obvious like it's fact. Not everything is obvious
> to everyone--Not everyone is a Steve or Stephanie. They may interpret
> conveyed information in different ways and the ambiguity does not help
> at all.

It should be obvious to anybody who bothered to read the description for
this mailing list before signing up.  I can't fix ignorance.


> There's a reason devs rarely answer questions. Devs should do what they
> do best, code and fix problems according to SE principles. If you really
> want to answer questions, go ahead, but if you don't want to be helpful,
> don't say anything. Someone else who does want to will chime in with a
> helpful response.

My reponse was helpful.  I guarantee you (unless that person is really
dense) that they won't use this list to complain about stable keywording
again.  Furthermore, any currently subscribed list user who didn't know
before will certainly know now.


>> Sounds like you had an agenda to bitch about and found my
>> email to be convenient.  In other words, you have no point.
>>
>> -Steve
> 
> I do have an agenda. I won't deny that. I think the Gentoo philosophy is
> essentially perfect, both as a development philosophy and also as an
> operational philosophy. When I see a dev who violates this philosophy
> with the way they behave, I am inclined to call them on it.
> Kari Hazzard

I'm sorry that everyone doesn't conform to your perfect utopian view of
the world.

Now, seeing that this thread itself has become terribly off-topic, this
will be the last thing I will say on the subject.

-Steve
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[m h]

> If we had an official place where people could complain about ebuilds
> not being stabilized, then I have a feeling most developers would avoid
> it like the plague.  Stuff like this is along the same lines as the
> "bump it!!!eleventy-one11!11" bugs which get filed the minute there is a
> new release of some program.  We tend to hate that, and there isn't much
> that could be done other than closing them with prejudice.
>

I'm the OT.  So I apologize to all devs whose precious time I have
wasted.  This post has probably now consumed about 10x as much time as
it should've by now.  I totally realize that it is probably super
annoying to get requests for bumping to stable.  And it wasn't my
intention at all to put pressure on anyone to bump KDE.   I was only
curious as to what was holding it up.

That was my bad for phrasing my question in such a sort manner (not
following the "howto ask smart questions" protocol).  I figured since,
I'm seeing posts about 2.6.16 going stable in "2-3 weeks" and
questions about firefox 1.5, then KDE would be kosher as well (since
it is arguable on of the most important apps on the linux desktop).

>
> >> I would like to point out that it was you who flamed me for apparently
> >> saying RTFM, when in fact if you read my original email, I did nothing
> >> of the sort.
> >
> > You gave a logical RTFM. You're being literal with words when the
> > meaning of what you said should be fairly clear. You didn't want to
> > answer the question, so you flamed the person who asked instead of
> > answering or defering to a more helpful individual.
>
> Not really.  I should have actually pointed out that there is no (good)
> place for such queries originally, but I was doing about 10 things at
> once, and just sent the typical "don't send offtopic stuff to the
> gentoo-dev list" reply.  Look back through the archives...this is pretty
> standard.
>
>
> >> I merely pointed out what should have been clear to anyone
> >> that signed up for this list, that it is not for whining about arch
> >> keywording.
> >
> > Not everyone is like you. There are all sorts of different people out
> > there who process information in a lot of different ways. Without a
> > stated correct place for asking questions about keywording, it wouldn't
> > be hard to rationalise that the proper place is the dev mailing list.
>
> Except that it isn't the proper place.  It is for discussion of
> technical matters concerning the development of Gentoo.  The closest
> place that might be sort of on-topic is the gentoo-desktop list, but I
> generally don't recommend that list because it seems like nobody bothers
> to answer questions there for the most part.  I think the problem is
> that the RightPeople(TM) (meaning all the members of the teams for each
> desktop herd) probably aren't subscribed there.
>

Sorry I'm not on the desktop list and since I was seeing other posts
about marking the kernel and firefox as stable, I figured kde fit in
as well.  My bad.  One solution to naggers like me may be to have
dedicated per package wiki/homepages where a status is shown (much
like Trac releases).  Or at least link to pending bugs.  Though I
realize that this is probably just more overhead for devs who are
already too busy and would rather just code.

>
> > You say it should be obvious like it's fact. Not everything is obvious
> > to everyone--Not everyone is a Steve or Stephanie. They may interpret
> > conveyed information in different ways and the ambiguity does not help
> > at all.
>
> It should be obvious to anybody who bothered to read the description for
> this mailing list before signing up.  I can't fix ignorance.

Thanks for the compliment ;)
"General Gentoo developer discussion mailing list" is the
description...  I guess my post was not general enough. ;)

>
>
> > There's a reason devs rarely answer questions. Devs should do what they
> > do best, code and fix problems according to SE principles. If you really
> > want to answer questions, go ahead, but if you don't want to be helpful,
> > don't say anything. Someone else who does want to will chime in with a
> > helpful response.
>
> My reponse was helpful.  I guarantee you (unless that person is really
> dense) that they won't use this list to complain about stable keywording
> again.  Furthermore, any currently subscribed list user who didn't know
> before will certainly know now.
>
Hmmm, I really wasn't trying to complain about the keywording of KDE. 
Sorry if it came out that way.  I really just wanted a status update
and again, since I saw others I figured it would be ok.  In the future
I will do the following:

 * Re-read "howto ask a smart question"
 * Find a mailing list that looks appropriate by the description
 * Spam that mailing list
 * Pending no response, find the dev and email them personally

For the benefit of us dense users, please let me know if this works.

-matt

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Phil Richards]

On 2006-04-04, m h <sesquile@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > You say it should be obvious like it's fact. Not everything is obvious
> > > to everyone--Not everyone is a Steve or Stephanie. They may interpret
> > > conveyed information in different ways and the ambiguity does not help
> > > at all.
> > It should be obvious to anybody who bothered to read the description for
> > this mailing list before signing up.  I can't fix ignorance.
>  "General Gentoo developer discussion mailing list" is the
>  description...  I guess my post was not general enough. ;)

Indeed.  There is an assumption that "Gentoo developer" should in fact be
read "Gentoo Developer".  And, of course, unless you know about the
special status of the proper noun "Gentoo Developer" you are likely to
think it is just somebody who develops stuff with/for Gentoo.  Hey,
I've written some ebuilds locally, doesn't that mean I'm a (small-d)
Gentoo developer?  Probably.

The list description could probably be a little more precise, I suspect.
I *know* I'm not stupid, and I misunderstood the intent of the mailing
list those years ago that I subscribed.

Anyway, wrt "I can't fix ignorance" - yes, actually you can.  If that
wasn't true then we'd all still in caves banging rocks together.

phil

back to lurking
-- 
change name before "@" to "phil" for email

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 19:04, m h wrote:
> I'm the OT.  So I apologize to all devs whose precious time I have
> wasted.  This post has probably now consumed about 10x as much time as
> it should've by now.  I totally realize that it is probably super
> annoying to get requests for bumping to stable.  And it wasn't my
> intention at all to put pressure on anyone to bump KDE.   I was only
> curious as to what was holding it up.

You didn't waste time at all. While your question might have been rather 
concise I found it topical enough, and proper. The one wasting our time is 
Stephen P. Becker by behaving a gentoo developer unworthy, and being called 
upon that. He's also forgetting that while one could try asking it at 
gentoo-user, the chances of getting an answer from the developers are very 
thin.

>
> That was my bad for phrasing my question in such a sort manner (not
> following the "howto ask smart questions" protocol).  I figured since,
> I'm seeing posts about 2.6.16 going stable in "2-3 weeks" and
> questions about firefox 1.5, then KDE would be kosher as well (since
> it is arguable on of the most important apps on the linux desktop).
>
> > >> I would like to point out that it was you who flamed me for apparently
> > >> saying RTFM, when in fact if you read my original email, I did nothing
> > >> of the sort.
> > >
> > > You gave a logical RTFM. You're being literal with words when the
> > > meaning of what you said should be fairly clear. You didn't want to
> > > answer the question, so you flamed the person who asked instead of
> > > answering or defering to a more helpful individual.
> >
> > Not really.  I should have actually pointed out that there is no (good)
> > place for such queries originally, but I was doing about 10 things at
> > once, and just sent the typical "don't send offtopic stuff to the
> > gentoo-dev list" reply.  Look back through the archives...this is pretty
> > standard.
> >
> > >> I merely pointed out what should have been clear to anyone
> > >> that signed up for this list, that it is not for whining about arch
> > >> keywording.
> > >
> > > Not everyone is like you. There are all sorts of different people out
> > > there who process information in a lot of different ways. Without a
> > > stated correct place for asking questions about keywording, it wouldn't
> > > be hard to rationalise that the proper place is the dev mailing list.
> >
> > Except that it isn't the proper place.  It is for discussion of
> > technical matters concerning the development of Gentoo.  The closest
> > place that might be sort of on-topic is the gentoo-desktop list, but I
> > generally don't recommend that list because it seems like nobody bothers
> > to answer questions there for the most part.  I think the problem is
> > that the RightPeople(TM) (meaning all the members of the teams for each
> > desktop herd) probably aren't subscribed there.
>
> Sorry I'm not on the desktop list and since I was seeing other posts
> about marking the kernel and firefox as stable, I figured kde fit in
> as well.  My bad.  One solution to naggers like me may be to have
> dedicated per package wiki/homepages where a status is shown (much
> like Trac releases).  Or at least link to pending bugs.  Though I
> realize that this is probably just more overhead for devs who are
> already too busy and would rather just code.
>
> > > You say it should be obvious like it's fact. Not everything is obvious
> > > to everyone--Not everyone is a Steve or Stephanie. They may interpret
> > > conveyed information in different ways and the ambiguity does not help
> > > at all.
> >
> > It should be obvious to anybody who bothered to read the description for
> > this mailing list before signing up.  I can't fix ignorance.
>
> Thanks for the compliment ;)
> "General Gentoo developer discussion mailing list" is the
> description...  I guess my post was not general enough. ;)

You are right, the list is about the development of gentoo. Asking what the 
reasons are why kde is not stabilized yet (while it used to be really fast) 
is totally relevant to that. The list is intentionally not developer only. It 
is a place for the interaction between developers and advanced users on what 
happens in gentoo. It's not for flames ;-).

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 18:37, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> My reponse was helpful.  I guarantee you (unless that person is really
> dense) that they won't use this list to complain about stable keywording
> again.  Furthermore, any currently subscribed list user who didn't know
> before will certainly know now.

Your response was far from helpful on a few accounts:
- You scared away the user related.
- You probably scared away various other users that were tricked into
  believing that the requirements for gentoo-dev are very high.
- You ignited a flamefest that probably chases of other list members.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 17:12, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> I hate to break it to you, but there really is no such place for such
> queries.  We generally consider it rude when users whine about stable
> keywording.  Therefore, I don't feel bad about a short response.

short != rude

This was not a wine, at least not phrased as it. And in the gentoo that I am a 
developer for, there is always place for polite questions. I am certain that 
this is also the gentoo that Daniel Robbins started.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Simon Stelling]

Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> I fail to see how pointing out a post was offtopic is mean.  Rather, it
> will save that individual (and hopefully others) from making the same
> mistake in the future.
> 
> Also, RTFM is absolutely the right answer more often than not.
> Otherwise, what is the point of having TFM in the first place?  The
> amusement of those who spent a lot of time and effort writing it?

That's not the problem. RTFM is never the right answer because 'please, 
RTM' is. Your mail pointing out that it was off-topic wasn't mean 
because it pointed out that fact, it was mean because it was written in 
a form that could have been much more friendlier.

A message is usually more than just the information in it.

-- 
Kind Regards,

Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Developer
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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 04:28, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> Kari Hazzard wrote:
> > This is Gentoo. We have a reputation of good community support to
> > maintain here. You're not helping that reputation by being mean to people
> > who ask legitimate questions. The issue that the question may have been
> > sent to the wrong list is irrelevant. RTFM is never the right answer to a
> > question.
>
> I fail to see how pointing out a post was offtopic is mean.  Rather, it
> will save that individual (and hopefully others) from making the same
> mistake in the future.
>
> Also, RTFM is absolutely the right answer more often than not.
> Otherwise, what is the point of having TFM in the first place?  The
> amusement of those who spent a lot of time and effort writing it?

Don't reply with RTFM, but with something like:

------------- template -------------
Hi sender,

This is explained far better than I could do here in 
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/foobar.xml
If you have further questions, feel free to ask.

Regards,

your friendly gentoo developer.
------------- end template -------------

Paul


-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Grant Goodyear]

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Kari Hazzard wrote: [Mon Apr 03 2006, 09:16:08PM CDT]
> This is Gentoo. We have a reputation of good community support to maintain 
> here. You're not helping that reputation by being mean to people who ask 
> legitimate questions. The issue that the question may have been sent to the 
> wrong list is irrelevant. RTFM is never the right answer to a question.

Although I agree with the overall spirit of the comment, I disagree that
RTFM is never the right answer.  It helps if somebody points out _which_
fine manual to read, but ":help hardcopy" is a much better answer to
"How do I print from within vim?" than actual detailed instructions
would be.

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 04:37, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Although I agree with the overall spirit of the comment, I disagree that
> RTFM is never the right answer.  It helps if somebody points out _which_
> fine manual to read, but ":help hardcopy" is a much better answer to
> "How do I print from within vim?" than actual detailed instructions
> would be.

I wholeheartly agree, just that the help to help yourself is not what I 
consider as RTFM. Of course you have to learn the relevant bits yourself, so 
being kindly pointed to exactly those bits is perfectly fine.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Michael Cummings]

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On Monday 03 April 2006 19:11, Stephen P. Becker wrote:
> Whether it is meant to be flamebait or not is irrelevant.  This list
> isn't for whining about (the lack of) stable keywords for any particular
> ebuild or set of ebuilds.

Probably missing part of the thread or something, but I think the OP was more 
looking for information on the stablization process within the kde herd, and 
there's probably no better place to ask shy of irc than on -dev (and not all 
people have the luxury of getting on irc).

Relax, spb, it's all good :)

~mcummings

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jan Kundrát]

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Michael Cummings wrote:
> Relax, spb, it's all good :)

spb != geoman :)

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Michael Cummings]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 05:42, Jan Kundrát wrote:
> Michael Cummings wrote:
> > Relax, spb, it's all good :)
>
> spb != geoman :)

BAH! People shouldn't be allowed to have overlapping initials or something....

/me puts moritorium on other mcummings and MPC's.

spb - sorry 'bout that :) 

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 01:05, m h wrote:
> This isn't meant as flamebait.  I'm running stable on my laptop and
> unstable on my desktop.  It seems like most KDE release get better
> over time, so I'm just wondering what the process is with KDE?
KDE 3.5.0 was quite broken -and required more patches than usual to get to an 
usable state-, KDE 3.5.1 was a bit better but stills some patches were 
needed, KDE 3.5.2 is in portage since less than a month, and already had a 
few patches with revbumps to few memleaks and crashes, a new kdelibs revbump 
is also planned, and umbrello 3.5.2 is regressed compared to 3.5.1 (that 
still, vanilla, wasn't usable for activity diagrams at all).

That said, I doubt we can have anything stable in less that another month or 
even two.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[m h]

On 4/3/06, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 April 2006 01:05, m h wrote:
> > This isn't meant as flamebait. I'm running stable on my laptop and
> > unstable on my desktop. It seems like most KDE release get better
> > over time, so I'm just wondering what the process is with KDE?
> KDE 3.5.0 was quite broken -and required more patches than usual to get to an
> usable state-, KDE 3.5.1 was a bit better but stills some patches were
> needed, KDE 3.5.2 is in portage since less than a month, and already had a
> few patches with revbumps to few memleaks and crashes, a new kdelibs revbump
> is also planned, and umbrello 3.5.2 is regressed compared to 3.5.1 (that
> still, vanilla, wasn't usable for activity diagrams at all).
>
> That said, I doubt we can have anything stable in less that another month or
> even two.
>

Diego -

Thanks for the response.

Steve-

Sorry to abuse the list.  Feel free to point me to the correct place
to post this.  I noticed it in the forums a few times without any
answer.

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[gentoo-dev] Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

m h posted <e36b84ee0604031625u2f0580bey7550f34109027db8@mail.gmail.com>,
excerpted below,  on Mon, 03 Apr 2006 15:25:56 -0800:

> Diego -
> 
> Thanks for the response.
> 
> Steve-
> 
> Sorry to abuse the list.  Feel free to point me to the correct place to
> post this.  I noticed it in the forums a few times without any answer.

Diego got to the direct answer before I did, but maybe I can help here. =8^)

The Gentoo-desktop list is lower volume and generally where I ask
(developer level) questions about anything so related, KDE, GNOME, burning
CD/DVDs, sometimes sound issues, etc.  Again, that's a developer list not
a general user list, but it's low enough volume and generally friendly
enough to get you the answers you need if it's something (like this) a dev
would need to answer.  (Of course, there are documents that point out a
general policy that's being followed, which you could read and check on
the release dates, but that doesn't specifically answer the question about
KDE 3.5, which is pretty reasonable IMO.)

For general user questions, the /very/ high volume gentoo-user list is
normally the right place.  That and the forums, which you (now) mention
you tried.

BTW, about the "(now) mention" part...  A good general reference is
Eric S. Raymond's essay "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way".  One of the
things it mentions is to briefly mention what you've already tried, in
this case, the forums. This does a couple things.  First, it avoids
needless  duplication with folks telling you about stuff you already
tried.  Second and as important, keep in mind that devs are busy folks,
often as with Gentoo volunteers, and to be effective, they must ruthlessly
sort out stuff that's not efficient for them to do.  Telling them what
you've already tried indicates that you are motivated enough to try
looking on your own first, and that it's therefore not simply a waste of
time to help you, because you are willing to help yourself.  Thus, the
"not a flame" thing was good, but throwing in the "I tried the forums
already and other folks are asking there too, without a good answer" part,
into your first mail, would have been better.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.html

(One of the other things it says is that if someone spends the time
answering, consider it a compliment, as they consider you worth the time
/to/ answer -- you got past their ruthless efficiency filter.  So...  you
can read back thru the answers and see who considered you worthy of a real
answer and who didn't, and the above might help explain why.  =8^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Duncan wrote:
> The Gentoo-desktop list is lower volume and generally where I ask
> (developer level) questions about anything so related, KDE, GNOME, burning
> CD/DVDs, sometimes sound issues, etc.  Again, that's a developer list not
> a general user list, but it's low enough volume and generally friendly
> enough to get you the answers you need if it's something (like this) a dev
> would need to answer.

Really it's both developer and user questions. It's just that the
uninteresting ones tend to get ignored for a while because they aren't
fun to answer for the 10th time or so. =)

Thanks,
Donnie


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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Donnie Berkholz posted <44320F27.8000003@gentoo.org>, excerpted below,  on
Mon, 03 Apr 2006 23:16:07 -0700:

> Duncan wrote:
>> The Gentoo-desktop list is lower volume and generally where I ask
>> (developer level) questions about anything so related, KDE, GNOME,
>> burning CD/DVDs, sometimes sound issues, etc.  Again, that's a developer
>> list not a general user list, but it's low enough volume and generally
>> friendly enough to get you the answers you need if it's something (like
>> this) a dev would need to answer.
> 
> Really it's both developer and user questions. It's just that the
> uninteresting ones tend to get ignored for a while because they aren't fun
> to answer for the 10th time or so. =)

That's sort of what I meant, but it wasn't wording quite right and I
didn't want to take too many liberties as user so I erred on the side of
caution. Thanks for the clarification. =8^)

(BTW, altho devs will know this already some users reading this may not,
Donnie B is the Gentoo Desktop project lead, so that's straight from the
source. =8^)

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060404 Diego 'Flameeyes' Petten? wrote:
> KDE 3.5.0 required more patches than usual to get to an usable state,
> KDE 3.5.1 was a bit better but still some patches were needed,
> KDE 3.5.2 is in portage since less than a month, and already
> had a few patches with revbumps to few memleaks and crashes,
> a new kdelibs revbump is also planned
> and umbrello 3.5.2 is regressed compared to 3.5.1 .

KDE is now modular: is it possible to upgrade some modules, but not others ?
Kdelibs would need to be stable, but must everything wait for stragglers ?
If I have Kdelibs 3.5.2 , can I still run eg Konsole 3.5.1 ?

I have been running a wide variety of KDE 3.5.1 pkgs without any problems
& before that ran KDE 3.5.0 successfully; I plan to get 3.5.2 soon.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 08:09, Philip Webb wrote:
> KDE is now modular: is it possible to upgrade some modules, but not others
> ? Kdelibs would need to be stable, but must everything wait for stragglers
> ? If I have Kdelibs 3.5.2 , can I still run eg Konsole 3.5.1 ?
As modular as it can be, it has to go stable in one piece.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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[gentoo-dev] Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò posted
<200604040843.09697@enterprise.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org>, excerpted below, 
on Tue, 04 Apr 2006 08:42:56 +0200:

> On Tuesday 04 April 2006 08:09, Philip Webb wrote:
>> KDE is now modular: is it possible to upgrade some modules, but not
>> others ? Kdelibs would need to be stable, but must everything wait for
>> stragglers ? If I have Kdelibs 3.5.2 , can I still run eg Konsole 3.5.1
>> ?
> As modular as it can be, it has to go stable in one piece.

PW:  Note that while Flameeyes' is correct from a dev perspective (it's
modular but there's a large degree of interdependence, so not stabilizing
it as a unit is asking for trouble), they /do/ "skip" certain packages in
the upgrades (within slot, 3.4 is a different slot than 3.5, but 3.5.0
thru 3.5.2, currently, are all the same 3.5 slot) -- those where there's
no new code and where the dependencies are stable enough that a recompile
against the new ones isn't required. In fact, that was given as one of the
big reasons for going modular in the first place.

>From a Genntoo user perspective, again within the same slot, once you've
upgraded arts (if you use it) and kdelibs, you can in general continue to
use a mix of old and new while you upgrade additional packages one at a
time.  I do this routinely for a few hours during the upgrade as
the rest of the new KDE is still merging.  Sometimes one or another binary
or particular function will stop working temporarily until it and all the
pieces it depends on are upgraded as well, but most stuff continues to
work well enough to continue to use. Just don't go filing bugs on anything
that breaks until the whole set is updated.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060404 Diego 'Flameeyes' Petten? wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 April 2006 08:09, Philip Webb wrote:
>> KDE is now modular: is it possible to upgrade some modules,
>> but not others ? Kdelibs would need to be stable,
>> but must everything wait for stragglers ?
>> If I have Kdelibs 3.5.2 , can I still run eg Konsole 3.5.1 ?
> As modular as it can be, it has to go stable in one piece.

Ok, you're the expert.  Thanks for the prompt & polite response.

It's basically a question how far a user can trust the upstream devs
& the KDE project team is one of the most competent among desktop stuff.
I will continue to ride the cutting-edge, knowing there's a tiny possibility
that something may not be quite right, eg the R-click-menu glitch
mentioned in another thread on Gentoo-user today.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto
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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Chris Bainbridge]

On 04/04/06, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:
> usable state-, KDE 3.5.1 was a bit better but stills some patches were
> needed, KDE 3.5.2 is in portage since less than a month, and already had a
> few patches with revbumps to few memleaks and crashes, a new kdelibs revbump
> is also planned, and umbrello 3.5.2 is regressed compared to 3.5.1 (that
> still, vanilla, wasn't usable for activity diagrams at all).

Surely the question isn't whether the upgrade is perfect, but whether
it's better than the current stable release?

'find /usr/portage/kde-base -name '*3.4.3*.patch' |wc -l' shows 15
patches, 3.5.1 has 11 patches, and 3.5.2 has 6 patches. (I realise
that isn't a perfect patch count...)

>From the handbook: "The use of ~arch denotes an ebuild requires
testing. The use of package.mask denotes that the application or
library itself is deemed unstable."

As far as I can see the *ebuilds* for kde work fine. If the newer
versions of kde have the problems you describe, then they should be
package.masked.

I think at this point it does more harm than good to be lagging behind
the current upstream kde - last time I checked the kde bugzilla
wouldn't even accept bug reports for the kde currently marked stable
as it was too old, and if bugs can't be filed then it's clearly
"unsupported upstream" and time to upgrade.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 11:12, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> Surely the question isn't whether the upgrade is perfect, but whether
> it's better than the current stable release?
It is not.

> 'find /usr/portage/kde-base -name '*3.4.3*.patch' |wc -l' shows 15
> patches, 3.5.1 has 11 patches, and 3.5.2 has 6 patches. (I realise
> that isn't a perfect patch count...)
Some of the patches are not in files/ for 3.5.x series. Also, many of the 
problems faced are more severe than 3.4.x series up to now.

> As far as I can see the *ebuilds* for kde work fine. If the newer
> versions of kde have the problems you describe, then they should be
> package.masked.
There's a big difference between theory and practice. We already get enough 
request to mark 3.5 stable (hell we had request to mark it stable when there 
were at least two systematical crashes for everyone), two weeks after 3.5.0 
release IIRC, if we were to put it under package.mask, we really would be 
submerged by bug reports and mails about that.

Anyway, ~arch is not technically broken as we patch that as soon as humanly 
possible, so it's not a p.mask kind of problem (a part from umbrello, but 
that's no news at all).

I can ensure you we'd like to mark 3.5 stable as much as you do, probably even 
more as there are fixed things, but it's not possible for now.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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[gentoo-dev] Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Chris Bainbridge posted
<623652d50604040212r6f543d37pedb645e979456755@mail.gmail.com>, excerpted
below,  on Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:12:21 +0100:

> I think at this point it does more harm than good to be lagging behind the
> current upstream kde - last time I checked the kde bugzilla wouldn't even
> accept bug reports for the kde currently marked stable as it was too old,
> and if bugs can't be filed then it's clearly "unsupported upstream" and
> time to upgrade.

Wow!  I run ~arch by choice and generally find its keywording suitable
(IOW, packages move from masked to ~arch at a generally appropriate
speed), but I didn't realize Gentoo KDE-stable was /that/ far behind! 
Point well made!

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Caleb Tennis]

>> I think at this point it does more harm than good to be lagging behind
>> the
>> current upstream kde - last time I checked the kde bugzilla wouldn't
>> even
>> accept bug reports for the kde currently marked stable as it was too
>> old,
>> and if bugs can't be filed then it's clearly "unsupported upstream" and
>> time to upgrade.
>
> Wow!  I run ~arch by choice and generally find its keywording suitable
> (IOW, packages move from masked to ~arch at a generally appropriate
> speed), but I didn't realize Gentoo KDE-stable was /that/ far behind!
> Point well made!

I think historically we were much more bleeding edge with our stable KDE
versions than at the moment, but if you've spent any significant time
playing with 3.5.0 or 3.5.1, I think you would agree that they are
terribly less stable than 3.4.3.  But in a few weeks I think 3.5.2 will be
stable and it will all be behind us.

Caleb

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Caleb Tennis posted
<63052.69.136.169.173.1144147119.squirrel@www.aei-tech.com>, excerpted
below,  on Tue, 04 Apr 2006 06:38:39 -0400:

> I think historically we were much more bleeding edge with our stable KDE
> versions than at the moment, but if you've spent any significant time
> playing with 3.5.0 or 3.5.1, I think you would agree that they are
> terribly less stable than 3.4.3.  But in a few weeks I think 3.5.2 will be
> stable and it will all be behind us.

I have, and it seems decently stable here. (Well, there's that expat
upgrade like a day after I had finished compiling 3.5.2, but some things
can't be helped and that upgrade would kill 3.4.x as well, if I'm not
mistaken -- may I suggest a KDE 3.5 and the expat upgrade go stable
together?)  In general, however, fairly stable.

However, part of that may well be that I'm running ~amd64, not x86, with
its many sub-archs hardware-wise and the problems some of them have.  As
amd64 is fairly new, there are only a couple of hardware subarchs for it
yet, and they are quite compatible, so stuff generally either works for
everyone or noone.  I've learned that I can safely comment out many of the
calls to stripflags or filterflags, as often, the condition they are
correcting for doesn't affect amd64, yet unfortunately, the calls aren't
conditioned on arch as they would be in a perfect world with access to
full testing on all archs right away.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060404 Caleb Tennis wrote:
> historically we were much more bleeding edge with our stable KDE versions,
> but if you've spent any significant time playing with 3.5.0 or 3.5.1,
> you would agree that they are terribly less stable than 3.4.3.

Not here !  I've used both (successively) every day
& can't recall a single crash or noteworthy (indeed any) problem.
It's true that I don't use Kmail & similar exchange-type apps
& some comments suggest that is where the bulk of instability lies.

The fact that KDE itself is no longer accepting bugs for 3.4.3
really does suggest there's something wrong with Gentoo's current criteria.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto
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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Bart Braem]

(sorry if you receive this mail twice, my subscription was not ok)

Philip Webb wrote:

> 060404 Caleb Tennis wrote:
>> historically we were much more bleeding edge with our stable KDE
>> versions, but if you've spent any significant time playing with 3.5.0 or
>> 3.5.1, you would agree that they are terribly less stable than 3.4.3.
> 
> Not here !  I've used both (successively) every day
> & can't recall a single crash or noteworthy (indeed any) problem.
> It's true that I don't use Kmail & similar exchange-type apps
> & some comments suggest that is where the bulk of instability lies.
> 
> The fact that KDE itself is no longer accepting bugs for 3.4.3
> really does suggest there's something wrong with Gentoo's current
> criteria.
> 
As a user I have to add my opinion here. I have been using Gentoo for some
years now and it was always fairly up to date. Currently KDE is really
behind on the current situation upstream. 
And then I wonder why. What makes us think we can not trust the KDE devs?
Does compiling KDE introduce so many bugs? I mean, let's be serious, all
other distributions have a stable 3.5.x now. Don't they experience all
those horrible bugs?
Seriously, this is really becoming an issue. As I pointed out in a bug I
filed for a stable KDE (for which I apologize, I should have looked here
first), some people are leaving Gentoo because of this slow upgrade
process. 
The classical answer from devs is "it's ready when it's ready". From a user
point of view this is very, very vague. Please give users a more clear
explanation, this creates great frustration when looking at other
distributions. Because it's stable there.

These are my 2 cents as a user. One that loves Gentoo. One that loves KDE.
One that's frustrated by the current situation. I am a CS so I know how
hard programming can be, don't get me wrong there. I do appreciate what you
guys do. But I can't understand why you do it this way right now.

Bart

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 13:48 +0200, Bart Braem wrote:
> Does compiling KDE introduce so many bugs? I mean, let's be serious, all
> other distributions have a stable 3.5.x now. Don't they experience all
> those horrible bugs?

Compiling KDE doesn't introduce bugs.  Compiling KDE with any
combination of USE/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/GCC/Glibc/etc does.  Remember that
we're a from-source distribution.  Guys like Debian or Red Hat just have
to compile it *once* then they make a package of it, with exactly *one*
set of options (USE), C(XX)FLAGS, gcc, glibc, etc. making their job
infinitely easier.

> Seriously, this is really becoming an issue. As I pointed out in a bug I
> filed for a stable KDE (for which I apologize, I should have looked here
> first), some people are leaving Gentoo because of this slow upgrade
> process.

Honestly, if they're leaving over something so minor, they're free to
go.  We're not a commercial distribution.  We don't sell Gentoo.  We're
not concerned with market share.

> The classical answer from devs is "it's ready when it's ready". From a user
> point of view this is very, very vague. Please give users a more clear
> explanation, this creates great frustration when looking at other
> distributions. Because it's stable there.

As I stated above, they have a *much* lower barrier of entry for making
something stable than we do.  We've tried making this explanation over
and over again.  The problem is that every single version of $package,
people don't look at the last explanation and ask again... and again...
and again... and again.  It gets very old to answer the same question
over and over again.  The simple answer is really "when we don't have
major showstopper bugs anymore".  Again, remember that we have to
support countless combinations from our users.  Other distributions need
to support only one.  They can use forms of tricks to get it to compile
that *one* time, including adding patches and other things that might
not be suitable for a from-source distribution.

> These are my 2 cents as a user. One that loves Gentoo. One that loves KDE.
> One that's frustrated by the current situation. I am a CS so I know how
> hard programming can be, don't get me wrong there. I do appreciate what you
> guys do. But I can't understand why you do it this way right now.

Quite simply, we don't want to give you crap.

If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest, then we would
have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago, and every single one of you KDE users
would be complaining about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
or breaks badly in so many places.  We would hear about how Gentoo sucks
where they can't even test such a major application as KDE properly.  We
would have users leaving in droves.  Now, we can't have both fast
stabilization *and* actual stability, so we err on the side of caution.
We don't like hearing complaints any more than anyone else, but we'd
rather hear a few "why isn't KDE stable yet" questions than *everyone*
saying we suck because KDE is broken.

I hope that sums it up for you.

By the way, this isn't just for KDE.  This is how we do *every* package.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jeff Rollin]

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I think that sums up some good answers to my questions, too.

Jeff.

On 04/05/06, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 13:48 +0200, Bart Braem wrote:
> > Does compiling KDE introduce so many bugs? I mean, let's be serious, all
> > other distributions have a stable 3.5.x now. Don't they experience all
> > those horrible bugs?
>
> Compiling KDE doesn't introduce bugs.  Compiling KDE with any
> combination of USE/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/GCC/Glibc/etc does.  Remember that
> we're a from-source distribution.  Guys like Debian or Red Hat just have
> to compile it *once* then they make a package of it, with exactly *one*
> set of options (USE), C(XX)FLAGS, gcc, glibc, etc. making their job
> infinitely easier.
>
> > Seriously, this is really becoming an issue. As I pointed out in a bug I
> > filed for a stable KDE (for which I apologize, I should have looked here
> > first), some people are leaving Gentoo because of this slow upgrade
> > process.
>
> Honestly, if they're leaving over something so minor, they're free to
> go.  We're not a commercial distribution.  We don't sell Gentoo.  We're
> not concerned with market share.
>
> > The classical answer from devs is "it's ready when it's ready". From a
> user
> > point of view this is very, very vague. Please give users a more clear
> > explanation, this creates great frustration when looking at other
> > distributions. Because it's stable there.
>
> As I stated above, they have a *much* lower barrier of entry for making
> something stable than we do.  We've tried making this explanation over
> and over again.  The problem is that every single version of $package,
> people don't look at the last explanation and ask again... and again...
> and again... and again.  It gets very old to answer the same question
> over and over again.  The simple answer is really "when we don't have
> major showstopper bugs anymore".  Again, remember that we have to
> support countless combinations from our users.  Other distributions need
> to support only one.  They can use forms of tricks to get it to compile
> that *one* time, including adding patches and other things that might
> not be suitable for a from-source distribution.
>
> > These are my 2 cents as a user. One that loves Gentoo. One that loves
> KDE.
> > One that's frustrated by the current situation. I am a CS so I know how
> > hard programming can be, don't get me wrong there. I do appreciate what
> you
> > guys do. But I can't understand why you do it this way right now.
>
> Quite simply, we don't want to give you crap.
>
> If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest, then we would
> have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago, and every single one of you KDE users
> would be complaining about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
> or breaks badly in so many places.  We would hear about how Gentoo sucks
> where they can't even test such a major application as KDE properly.  We
> would have users leaving in droves.  Now, we can't have both fast
> stabilization *and* actual stability, so we err on the side of caution.
> We don't like hearing complaints any more than anyone else, but we'd
> rather hear a few "why isn't KDE stable yet" questions than *everyone*
> saying we suck because KDE is broken.
>
> I hope that sums it up for you.
>
> By the way, this isn't just for KDE.  This is how we do *every* package.
>
> --
> Chris Gianelloni
> Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
> x86 Architecture Team
> Games - Developer
> Gentoo Linux
>
>
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>
>


--
------------------------------------------------------
Argument against Linux number 6,033:

"...So this is like most Linux viruses. You have to download the virus
yourself, become root, install it and then run it. Seems like a lot of work
just to experience what you can get on Windows with a lot less trouble."

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4735 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060504 Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest,
> then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago,
> and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining
> about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
> or breaks badly in so many places.

This is rubbish: I'm now using 3.5.2 & have had no problems whatsoever;
nor did I have problems earlier with 3.5.0 & 3.5.1 .

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jakub Moc]

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Philip Webb wrote:
> 060504 Chris Gianelloni wrote:
>> If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest,
>> then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago,
>> and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining
>> about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
>> or breaks badly in so many places.
> 
> This is rubbish: I'm now using 3.5.2 & have had no problems whatsoever;
> nor did I have problems earlier with 3.5.0 & 3.5.1 .
> 

Oh, sure it's complete rubbish... there are only ~40 bugs open right now
about KDE 3.5 (on a quick and definitely incomplete search). The
fixed/upstream ones would definitely be well over 100, don't have any
good query for that.

http://tinyurl.com/rg55l

But yeah, you know better, no problems whatsoever. :P

-- 
Best regards,

 Jakub Moc
 mailto:jakub@gentoo.org
 GPG signature:
 http://subkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xCEBA3D9E
 Primary key fingerprint: D2D7 933C 9BA1 C95B 2C95  B30F 8717 D5FD CEBA 3D9E

 ... still no signature   ;)


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060505 Jakub Moc wrote:
> Philip Webb wrote:
>> 060504 Chris Gianelloni wrote:
>>> If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest,
>>> then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago,
>>> and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining
>>> about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
>>> or breaks badly in so many places.
>> This is rubbish: I'm now using 3.5.2 & have had no problems whatsoever;
>> nor did I have problems earlier with 3.5.0 & 3.5.1 .
> Oh, sure it's complete rubbish...
> there are only ~40 bugs open right now about KDE 3.5
> (on a quick and definitely incomplete search).
> The fixed/upstream ones would definitely be well over 100,
> don't have any good query for that.

Well, if you're going to wait for all bugs with all KDE packages
on all platforms to be fixed, you'll never stabilise any new KDE version.

It's time developers started thinking a bit more like users:
which version of KDE do you use everyday ?
 
> http://tinyurl.com/rg55l

  122121 x86-64 ; 121270 "can't reproduce" (twice);
  114860 kmail (I don't use Kmail, which is  1  modular package).

I don't have time to go through them all, but that's the 1st 3 I picked.
These are not reasons to keep the majority of KDE packages in ~x86 .

> But yeah, you know better, no problems whatsoever. :P

Yes, I know better: I haven't had any problems with any of the KDE packages
which I have installed with versions 3.5.0 3.5.1 3.5.2 .
It's time the developers started listening to users in this area:
we really do appreciate your volunteer work,
but without users that work would all be pointless.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jakub Moc]

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Philip Webb wrote:
>> But yeah, you know better, no problems whatsoever. :P
> 
> Yes, I know better: I haven't had any problems with any of the KDE packages
> which I have installed with versions 3.5.0 3.5.1 3.5.2 .
> It's time the developers started listening to users in this area:
> we really do appreciate your volunteer work,
> but without users that work would all be pointless.

It's been explained many times that the fact that *you* didn't have any
problems whatsoever is completely *irrelevant*, at least until *you* are
the only Gentoo KDE user. Please, read what other people have said and
don't waste our time with completely invalid arguments.


-- 
Best regards,

 Jakub Moc
 mailto:jakub@gentoo.org
 GPG signature:
 http://subkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xCEBA3D9E
 Primary key fingerprint: D2D7 933C 9BA1 C95B 2C95  B30F 8717 D5FD CEBA 3D9E

 ... still no signature   ;)


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Michael Kirkland]

On Friday 05 May 2006 01:11, Jakub Moc wrote:
> Philip Webb wrote:
> >> But yeah, you know better, no problems whatsoever. :P
> >
> > Yes, I know better: I haven't had any problems with any of the KDE
> > packages which I have installed with versions 3.5.0 3.5.1 3.5.2 .
> > It's time the developers started listening to users in this area:
> > we really do appreciate your volunteer work,
> > but without users that work would all be pointless.
>
> It's been explained many times that the fact that *you* didn't have any
> problems whatsoever is completely *irrelevant*, at least until *you* are
> the only Gentoo KDE user. Please, read what other people have said and
> don't waste our time with completely invalid arguments.

The vast majority of KDE users, Gentoo or no, are not having problems with KDE 
3.5. Does it not make sense for the defaults to accommodate the majority, 
with workarounds for the minority, rather than the other way around?
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Chris Bainbridge]

On 05/05/06, Jakub Moc <jakub@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Philip Webb wrote:
> > 060504 Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> >> If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest,
> >> then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago,
> >> and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining
> >> about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
> >> or breaks badly in so many places.
> >
> > This is rubbish: I'm now using 3.5.2 & have had no problems whatsoever;
> > nor did I have problems earlier with 3.5.0 & 3.5.1 .
> >
>
> Oh, sure it's complete rubbish... there are only ~40 bugs open right now
> about KDE 3.5 (on a quick and definitely incomplete search). The
> fixed/upstream ones would definitely be well over 100, don't have any
> good query for that.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/rg55l
>
> But yeah, you know better, no problems whatsoever. :P

KDE 3.4 has at least 31 open bugs on a quick and incomplete search.

http://tinyurl.com/mzzoo

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jeff Smelser]

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On Friday 05 May 2006 02:14, Philip Webb wrote:
> 060504 Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest,
> > then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago,
> > and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining
> > about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
> > or breaks badly in so many places.
>
> This is rubbish: I'm now using 3.5.2 & have had no problems whatsoever;
> nor did I have problems earlier with 3.5.0 & 3.5.1 .

Your lucky, Kmail crashes daily.. Akregator is buggy too. I have seen lots of 
stuff.

Jeff

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Richard Fish]

On 5/5/06, Philip Webb <purslow@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 060504 Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > If we followed others blindly, as so many users suggest,
> > then we would have stabilized KDE 3.5 ages ago,
> > and every single one of you KDE users would be complaining
> > about how our QA sucks because KDE doesn't compile
> > or breaks badly in so many places.
>
> This is rubbish: I'm now using 3.5.2 & have had no problems whatsoever;
> nor did I have problems earlier with 3.5.0 & 3.5.1 .

Not rubbish.  I had problems.  So did many others.  Fortunately mine
were of the "just annoying" variety, not of the "crap, did I make a
backup last night?" kind.  If you don't believe me, take a walk
through bugs.kde.org.  The Gentoo devs have done the right thing by
holding back on stabilizing KDE.

-Richard

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jeff Rollin]

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All,

If I might weigh in at this late stage:

How did we end up here in the first place? Isn't the point of ~arch that we
can put stuff here that might WELL be unstable? Sure, we'll get lots of "I
set my ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to ~arch and now my system is broken," messages, but
if people are going to try ~arch, or Gentoo in general, despite warnings
that it's "not for newbies" (and I have personal experience of this), we
can't really stop them without turning the community into a fascist state,
can we? Gentoo (like all projects) has a finite amount of developers, and if
we spend to much time on ~arch then surely arch will suffer

Just my 0.2 cents (sic)

Jeff.

On 04/05/06, Bart Braem <bart.braem@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (sorry if you receive this mail twice, my subscription was not ok)
>
> Philip Webb wrote:
>
> > 060404 Caleb Tennis wrote:
> >> historically we were much more bleeding edge with our stable KDE
> >> versions, but if you've spent any significant time playing with 3.5.0or
> >> 3.5.1, you would agree that they are terribly less stable than 3.4.3.
> >
> > Not here ! I've used both (successively) every day
> > & can't recall a single crash or noteworthy (indeed any) problem.
> > It's true that I don't use Kmail & similar exchange-type apps
> > & some comments suggest that is where the bulk of instability lies.
> >
> > The fact that KDE itself is no longer accepting bugs for 3.4.3
> > really does suggest there's something wrong with Gentoo's current
> > criteria.
> >
> As a user I have to add my opinion here. I have been using Gentoo for some
> years now and it was always fairly up to date. Currently KDE is really
> behind on the current situation upstream.
> And then I wonder why. What makes us think we can not trust the KDE devs?
> Does compiling KDE introduce so many bugs? I mean, let's be serious, all
> other distributions have a stable 3.5.x now. Don't they experience all
> those horrible bugs?
> Seriously, this is really becoming an issue. As I pointed out in a bug I
> filed for a stable KDE (for which I apologize, I should have looked here
> first), some people are leaving Gentoo because of this slow upgrade
> process.
> The classical answer from devs is "it's ready when it's ready". From a
> user
> point of view this is very, very vague. Please give users a more clear
> explanation, this creates great frustration when looking at other
> distributions. Because it's stable there.
>
> These are my 2 cents as a user. One that loves Gentoo. One that loves KDE.
> One that's frustrated by the current situation. I am a CS so I know how
> hard programming can be, don't get me wrong there. I do appreciate what
> you
> guys do. But I can't understand why you do it this way right now.
>
> Bart
>
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


--
------------------------------------------------------
Argument against Linux number 6,033:

"...So this is like most Linux viruses. You have to download the virus
yourself, become root, install it and then run it. Seems like a lot of work
just to experience what you can get on Windows with a lot less trouble."

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3657 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Thursday 04 May 2006 14:21, Jeff Rollin wrote:
> All,
>
> If I might weigh in at this late stage:
>
> How did we end up here in the first place? Isn't the point of ~arch
> that we can put stuff here that might WELL be unstable? Sure, we'll get
> lots of "I set my ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to ~arch and now my system is
> broken," messages, but if people are going to try ~arch, or Gentoo in
> general, despite warnings that it's "not for newbies" (and I have
> personal experience of this), we can't really stop them without turning
> the community into a fascist state, can we? Gentoo (like all projects)
> has a finite amount of developers, and if we spend to much time on
> ~arch then surely arch will suffer

Actually the testing keywords are not for unstable packages. If something 
is unstable it must be masked. If we however want to test our packaging 
we put it in ~arch. If something is in ~arch that means that it works for 
the packager, but that your mileage may vary. ~arch may sometimes have 
unexpected problems, especially involving migration from old versions to 
new versions. Actually most time is spent on ~arch, as there is where 
development happens. As a package is seen to be stable, then it gets 
promoted to arch. This is just a change of the keyword. The developer 
then goes on to newer versions of the package.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jeff Rollin]

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Paul,

That cleared it up for me, thanks

Jeff.

On 04/05/06, Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> Actually the testing keywords are not for unstable packages. If something
> is unstable it must be masked. If we however want to test our packaging
> we put it in ~arch. If something is in ~arch that means that it works for
> the packager, but that your mileage may vary. ~arch may sometimes have
> unexpected problems, especially involving migration from old versions to
> new versions. Actually most time is spent on ~arch, as there is where
> development happens. As a package is seen to be stable, then it gets
> promoted to arch. This is just a change of the keyword. The developer
> then goes on to newer versions of the package.
>
> Paul
>
> --
> Paul de Vrieze
> Gentoo Developer
> Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
> Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net
>
>
>


--
------------------------------------------------------
Argument against Linux number 6,033:

"...So this is like most Linux viruses. You have to download the virus
yourself, become root, install it and then run it. Seems like a lot of work
just to experience what you can get on Windows with a lot less trouble."

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1638 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Michael Kirkland]

On Thursday 04 May 2006 05:21, Jeff Rollin wrote:
> All,
>
> If I might weigh in at this late stage:
>
> How did we end up here in the first place? Isn't the point of ~arch that we
> can put stuff here that might WELL be unstable? Sure, we'll get lots of "I
> set my ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to ~arch and now my system is broken," messages, but
> if people are going to try ~arch, or Gentoo in general, despite warnings
> that it's "not for newbies" (and I have personal experience of this), we
> can't really stop them without turning the community into a fascist state,
> can we? Gentoo (like all projects) has a finite amount of developers, and
> if we spend to much time on ~arch then surely arch will suffer
>
> Just my 0.2 cents (sic)
>
> Jeff.

I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap the 
Debian project has been mired in forever. "arch" and "~arch" are polarizing 
into "stable, but horribly out of date", and "maybe it will work".

This leads to people trying to maintain a 
frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding to it 
and never knowing when things can be removed from it.

I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be moved to from 
"~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration values, but still have 
open bugs for some people.

That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run "arch", 
and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run the middle 
tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jeff Rollin]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1344 bytes --]

I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap the
> Debian project has been mired in forever. "arch" and "~arch" are
> polarizing
> into "stable, but horribly out of date", and "maybe it will work".
>
> This leads to people trying to maintain a
> frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding to it
> and never knowing when things can be removed from it.
>
> I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be moved to
> from
> "~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration values, but still have
> open bugs for some people.
>
> That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> "arch",
> and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run the
> middle
> tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
Or maybe we could move to a fixed release cycle. Debian uses 18 (?) months,
but maybe a 3- or 6-month release cycle would suit us better

Jeff.

--
------------------------------------------------------
Argument against Linux number 6,033:

"...So this is like most Linux viruses. You have to download the virus
yourself, become root, install it and then run it. Seems like a lot of work
just to experience what you can get on Windows with a lot less trouble."

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Jeff Rollin posted
<8a0028260605042228t625ca152p25d65cd6bb9c8e72@mail.gmail.com>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 05 May 2006 06:28:53 +0100:

> Or maybe we could move to a fixed release cycle. Debian uses 18 (?)
> months, but maybe a 3- or 6-month release cycle would suit us better

Actually, Gentoo already has that, altho the period is still getting
tweaked occasionally.  That's what the 200X.Y releases are, with the
LiveCDs and stages, and the PackagesCD with its precompiled stuff, for
those who want to go that route.  In 2004, there were four quarterly
releases, 2004.0-2004.3.  In 2005, they reduced that to two semi-yearly
releases, 2005.0 and 2005.1 (with a 2005.1-r1 coming out soon after, with
limited changes fixing limited bugs).  In 2006, the target is again two
releases, the first of which, 2006.0, has already occurred.  Thus, it
looks as if the 6-month cycle seems to be suitable for the time being.

Of course, one of the big benefits to Gentoo is that it's not the jerky
upgrade/wait/upgrade cycle other distributions tend toward, but more a
continuously upgraded system, with the periodic snapshot releases simply
being exactly that, snapshots of the tree that have been fairly well
tested on a particular arch and found to work reasonably well as a place
to start.  Once the system is up and going, the assumption is that folks
will update at least a time or two between snapshot releases, with many
updating twice weekly to daily.  The more frequently you update,
generally, the smoother the updates will be, because it won't be such a
big jump all at once.

Within that system, what's stable at the particular snapshot date gets
tested and included in the stages, and live and packages CDs.  There is of
course some push to get stuff stable by a particular release, but that
pressure hits Gentoo sponsored and targeted projects like portage and
baselayout the hardest, with the vast majority of packages affected more
by the timing and releases upstream than by Gentoo's snapshot releases.

That's part of what makes Gentoo Gentoo.  To change it changes the Gentoo
we know into something else -- /not/ the Gentoo we know.  I doubt you'll
find much support for significant change among Gentoo devs /or/ users,
because after all, if they didn't like it, they'd not have chosen Gentoo
in the first place, as that's one of the defining characteristics that
makes Gentoo what it is.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo)]

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On Thu, 04 May 2006 16:29:56 -0700
Michael Kirkland <mpkirkland@shaw.ca> wrote:

> This leads to people trying to maintain a 
> frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding
> to it and never knowing when things can be removed from it.

If you use specific versions in the package.keywords file (i.e. do
"=category/package-version-revision ~arch" instead of
"category/package ~arch", this doesn't happen. You just need to watch
for downgrades in case a ~arch version is removed without ever going
stable, and every so often go through it looking for package versions
that have been superseded.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Friday 05 May 2006 08:32, Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo) wrote:
> If you use specific versions in the package.keywords file (i.e. do
> "=category/package-version-revision ~arch" instead of
> "category/package ~arch", this doesn't happen.

Hardcoding specific ~arch versions or revisions unless absolutely needed is a 
bad idea. Remember that we don't do GLSA's for testing stuff. If bleeding 
edge, then bleeding edge.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo)]

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On Fri, 5 May 2006 13:20:09 +0200
Carsten Lohrke <carlo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Friday 05 May 2006 08:32, Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo) wrote:
> > If you use specific versions in the package.keywords file (i.e. do
> > "=category/package-version-revision ~arch" instead of
> > "category/package ~arch", this doesn't happen.
> 
> Hardcoding specific ~arch versions or revisions unless absolutely
> needed is a bad idea. Remember that we don't do GLSA's for testing
> stuff. If bleeding edge, then bleeding edge.

I disagree.  Your argument is for not using ~arch at all, rather
than an argument against keeping control of what you have from ~arch.

If I want something from ~arch, it's for one of two reasons:
1) There's a feature/fix that I need now
2) I want to try out a new version of something for fun

I certainly don't want to take everything from ~arch; that way leads to
regular system instability.

In practice, I tend to do:

=category/package-version* ~arch

so that I pick up -rN bumps on unstable versions as this should mean
that the maintainer considers the change necessary for users of that
version.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Friday 05 May 2006 15:23, Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo) wrote:
> I disagree.  Your argument is for not using ~arch at all, rather
> than an argument against keeping control of what you have from ~arch.

No. My argument is that category/ebuild is much better than 
=category/ebuild-x*. If and only if there's a problem with the former, you 
should take the latter into account and monitor the ebuild changes closely.

> In practice, I tend to do:
>
> =category/package-version* ~arch
>
> so that I pick up -rN bumps on unstable versions as this should mean
> that the maintainer considers the change necessary for users of that
> version.

So you won't get security updates, when this means it is a version bump. And 
this is most often the case. Unless you _always_ read the ChangeLogs and 
referenced bugs of all ebuilds you run testing, this is not safe.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo)]

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On Fri, 5 May 2006 16:38:57 +0200
Carsten Lohrke <carlo@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Friday 05 May 2006 15:23, Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo) wrote:
> > I disagree.  Your argument is for not using ~arch at all, rather
> > than an argument against keeping control of what you have from
> > ~arch.
> 
> No. My argument is that category/ebuild is much better than 
> =category/ebuild-x*. If and only if there's a problem with the
> former, you should take the latter into account and monitor the
> ebuild changes closely.

From my perspective, category/package is worse.  It means once a package
goes ~arch, it never becomes arch again.  My approach means that when
I've gone ~arch to get something only available in that version, it
becomes arch once the package gets stabilised or a later version is
stabilised.

> > In practice, I tend to do:
> >
> > =category/package-version* ~arch
> >
> > so that I pick up -rN bumps on unstable versions as this should mean
> > that the maintainer considers the change necessary for users of that
> > version.
> 
> So you won't get security updates, when this means it is a version
> bump. And this is most often the case. Unless you _always_ read the
> ChangeLogs and referenced bugs of all ebuilds you run testing, this
> is not safe.

First, I'll get the security updates when (1) the relevant updated
package goes stable, which is usually pretty quickly, or (2)
notification is made in gentoo-announce (which must be the correct
place to get such notifications).

Secondly, "Up-to-date on GLSAs" != "safe".  Not by a long shot.
Further, missing GLSAs does not necessarily mean I'm vulnerable.
That's what the detail is for in the GLSAs; so I can make a judgement
call on whether I need to worry about a vulnerability or not.

Lastly, if there are versions of a package in ~arch that have known
security flaws, my understanding is that they either get patched with a
-rN bump, or they get removed from the tree in favour of a later
version that is not vulnerable.  Either way, I get notification when I
next do an update.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Friday 05 May 2006 20:37, Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo) wrote:
> First, I'll get the security updates when (1) the relevant updated
> package goes stable, which is usually pretty quickly, or (2)
> notification is made in gentoo-announce (which must be the correct
> place to get such notifications).

That they go stable quickly is a bet and not always true. When there never was 
an stable ebuild, there won't be an announcement.

> Secondly, "Up-to-date on GLSAs" != "safe".  Not by a long shot.
> Further, missing GLSAs does not necessarily mean I'm vulnerable.
> That's what the detail is for in the GLSAs; so I can make a judgement
> call on whether I need to worry about a vulnerability or not.

It's a difference, if you can trust on a security team taking care or if you 
have to do it all yourself. That there will never be 100% perfect security is 
a different topic.

> Lastly, if there are versions of a package in ~arch that have known
> security flaws, my understanding is that they either get patched with a
> -rN bump, or they get removed from the tree in favour of a later
> version that is not vulnerable.  Either way, I get notification when I
> next do an update.

That previous ebuilds get removed is another bet, I wouldn't make. You 
claim "Up-to-date on GLSAs" != "safe" (which isn't wrong of course), but base 
your dealing with possible vulnerabilities on assumptions. That doesn't 
match.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 15:23 +0200, Kevin F. Quinn (Gentoo) wrote:
> In practice, I tend to do:
> 
> =category/package-version* ~arch

~category/package-version ~arch

*grin*

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Bart Braem]

Michael Kirkland wrote:

> I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap the
> Debian project has been mired in forever. "arch" and "~arch" are
> polarizing into "stable, but horribly out of date", and "maybe it will
> work".
> 
> This leads to people trying to maintain a
> frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding to it
> and never knowing when things can be removed from it.
> 
> I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be moved to
> from "~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration values, but still
> have open bugs for some people.
> 
> That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> "arch", and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run
> the middle tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.

I really, really agree here. I know this seems like a flamewar but it is
starting to annoy me. There are several packages that are several months
behind the official releases. I am going to name some of them:
Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)
KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this time)
Xorg 7: 5 months
I know we have a lot of work to do, but I have some concerns. How long are
we going to maintain old packages? KDE 3.4.3 is no longer supported by the
KDE developpers. Firefox extensions for 1.0 are becoming extinct. 
You are also getting a lot of work trying to fix bugs in old software. Most
probably you are starting to backport bugfixes, is this the way we want
things to go?
I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
One nice thing for users would be the addition of more metabugs for recent
packages. I'd like to know why some packages are not stable, and I am not
the only one. Adding a metabug instead of closing all requests for
stabilization with wontfix/wontresolve is much more userfriendly.

Once again, I love to use Gentoo but I don't understand the current
situation. I have the feeling that I'm not the only user so I posted these
comments in order to discuss them. Hopefully you don't mind trying to
explain it all...

Bart

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Harald van Dijk]

On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 09:20:08AM +0200, Bart Braem wrote:
> Michael Kirkland wrote:
> 
> > I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap the
> > Debian project has been mired in forever. "arch" and "~arch" are
> > polarizing into "stable, but horribly out of date", and "maybe it will
> > work".
> > 
> > This leads to people trying to maintain a
> > frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file, constantly adding to it
> > and never knowing when things can be removed from it.
> > 
> > I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be moved to
> > from "~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration values, but still
> > have open bugs for some people.
> > 
> > That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> > "arch", and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run
> > the middle tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.
> 
> I really, really agree here. I know this seems like a flamewar but it is
> starting to annoy me. There are several packages that are several months
> behind the official releases. I am going to name some of them:

Disclaimer: I maintain none of the packages you mentioned, so these are
possible reasons, there may be other more important reasons that I
didn't think of.

> Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)

The ebuild itself causes problems with LINGUAS because of a portage bug
(or limitation). And on IRC just yesterday two devs complained about
Firefox because for one, 1.5 was unacceptably slow, and for another
1.5.0.3 took 100% CPU. Additionally, the latest stable is 1.0.8, which
was released less than a month ago; the 1.0 versions are still
maintained.

> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this time)

kdelibs-3.5.2 needed fixes and workarounds for miscompilations and
crashes less than a month ago, according to the changelog.

> Xorg 7: 5 months

Strange behaviour for some with virtual/x11 being provided when it
shouldn't be, causing missing dependencies for other ebuilds, and
compilation issues.

> I know we have a lot of work to do, but I have some concerns. How long are
> we going to maintain old packages? KDE 3.4.3 is no longer supported by the
> KDE developpers. Firefox extensions for 1.0 are becoming extinct. 
> You are also getting a lot of work trying to fix bugs in old software. Most
> probably you are starting to backport bugfixes, is this the way we want
> things to go?
> I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
> bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
> is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
> in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
> One nice thing for users would be the addition of more metabugs for recent
> packages. I'd like to know why some packages are not stable, and I am not
> the only one. Adding a metabug instead of closing all requests for
> stabilization with wontfix/wontresolve is much more userfriendly.

Searching for open and recently closed bugs about the packages in
question can help a lot in figuring out reasons packages aren't
marked stable. As for metabugs, they would help if the package
maintainers feel software is almost ready to go stable and just want to
finish up the remaining issues, but in other cases, why? How does it
help?

> Once again, I love to use Gentoo but I don't understand the current
> situation. I have the feeling that I'm not the only user so I posted these
> comments in order to discuss them. Hopefully you don't mind trying to
> explain it all...
> 
> Bart
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Bart Braem wrote:
> Xorg 7: 5 months

Can't stabilize till portage 2.1 is stable. Doesn't matter how many open
bugs we've got, or how well it works.

Thanks,
Donnie


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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Bart Braem]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:

> Bart Braem wrote:
>> Xorg 7: 5 months
> 
> Can't stabilize till portage 2.1 is stable. Doesn't matter how many open
> bugs we've got, or how well it works.
> 
Thanks for the explanation. Not that I really like it but I understand that
portage 2.1 is a large upgrade...

Bart

-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Bart Braem posted <e3f37g$uqo$1@sea.gmane.org>, excerpted below,  on Fri,
05 May 2006 10:43:28 +0200:

> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
>> Bart Braem wrote:
>>> Xorg 7: 5 months
>> 
>> Can't stabilize till portage 2.1 is stable. Doesn't matter how many open
>> bugs we've got, or how well it works.
>> 
> Thanks for the explanation. Not that I really like it but I understand
> that portage 2.1 is a large upgrade...

That of course begs the question of portage 2.1 stabilization.

FWIW, as a (mostly) lurker on the portage-devel group/list, I believe
it's safe to say that 2.1-rcs are "coming real soon now". There's an
active discussion at the moment on whether to base -rc1 on -pre10, which
introduced some code cleanups, -pre9, before those cleanups but after the
intro of manifest2 (a big target feature that needs included, but that
will mean a bit longer to stabilize), or -pre7, before manifest2. Whatever
the decision, portage trunk is now feature-frozen until the split is made,
so the 2.1 stabilization process is now started.

The target is stabilization of 2.1 for Gentoo 2006.1, penciled in for
release this (northern hemisphere) summer (July-ish, AFAIK).  Assuming
that target is hit, Donnie should be able to say whether xorg 7 should
stabilize at the same time and be ready for 2006.1 as well, or whether
it'll be slightly behind, perhaps 30-days or so -- IOW, whether its 30 day
stabilization is in parallel to or occurs after the 30-day stabilization
of portage 2.1.

In any case, given his statement above and the events from portage-devel,
a reasonably safe prediction should be that they'll both be stable by the
end of the (northern hemisphere) summer, with a target of mid-summer.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Patrick Lauer]

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On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 09:20 +0200, Bart Braem wrote:
> > That way, people who prefer stability over the latest features can run
> > "arch", and everyone who bitches about packages being out of date can run
> > the middle tag, and "~arch" can be kept for testing.
> 
> I really, really agree here. I know this seems like a flamewar but it is
> starting to annoy me. There are several packages that are several months
> behind the official releases. I am going to name some of them:
> Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)
broken, unstable, no good
(memleaks and horrible performance on a substantial amount of
systems ...)

> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this time)
~40 bugs open as Chris said. No go.

> Xorg 7: 5 months
I don't know the status on this one, but I guess it's going to be done
when it's done

Also GCC 4.x - all others are using it, right?
Well ... 4.0 was a mess, 4.1 is looking good and should be available
soon - when everything compiles with it.

> I know we have a lot of work to do, but I have some concerns. How long are
> we going to maintain old packages? KDE 3.4.3 is no longer supported by the
> KDE developpers. Firefox extensions for 1.0 are becoming extinct. 
> You are also getting a lot of work trying to fix bugs in old software. Most
> probably you are starting to backport bugfixes, is this the way we want
> things to go?
No, but if the new version is buggy it's not going to be unmasked just
because upstream would prefer that.

> I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
> bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
> is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
> in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
So go ~x86 all the way ... it's been good enough for me for ~2 years now

I understand your frustration, I'd like Gentoo to be more "bleeding
edge" as it used to be, but then I have an install that was originally
1.2 (I think, might have been 1.4rc) that was updated and recompiled
every now and then - that's really awesome, I don't know of any other
distro that offers such good migration paths.

Just my 2 cents,

Patrick
-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Friday 05 May 2006 09:20, Bart Braem wrote:
> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this
> time)
Now I think we really explained that well enough, we're working to mark it 
stable as soon as we can.

*We don't care if you wanted it stable yesterday, it will be stable when it's 
ready to go stable.*

And before people start thinking we got 3.5.2 months before it was released, 
the prereleases are three days before final release, they are _not_ for 
testing purposes, they are for binary distributions to prepare packages and 
for us to prepare ebuild, and a "build & run" kind of test to make sure there 
are no obvious problems.

Although modular, KDE 3.5 has to go stable _at once_ and if KMail is totally 
broken, or has major feature loss (it had), we can't go stable.

Now, we're going to stable this as soon as it's possible, but making us lose 
time on this is something you don't want, as that takes time to the bugs 
resolution.

If you really want, you use ~arch directly, I'm doing that since I started 
using Gentoo, and works as a charm for me.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060505 Diego 'Flameeyes' Petten? wrote:
> Although modular, KDE 3.5 has to go stable _at once_
> and if KMail is totally broken or has major feature loss, we can't.

I've seen this stated before, but why does it have to be "_at once_" ?
Many packages have  > 1  stable version available,
so users might have KDE 3.4.3 (all) & 3.5.1 (parts) by now,
with the rest of 3.5.1 & then some of 3.5.2 to follow soon.

Also, KDE can be divided up among  >= 7  downloadable .bz2's.
I have  6  of them for the packages I use
-- base games libs edu graphics utils -- & there is also  kdepim ,
which would be needed for the problematic Kmail etc .
Any stable version of KDE will need  kdelibs kdebase ,
but otherwise why can't the packages be made stable
at least as each big downloadable file becomes ready, if not individually ?

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Saturday 06 May 2006 08:48, Philip Webb wrote:
> I've seen this stated before, but why does it have to be "_at once_" ?
Because 3.4 and 3.5 does _NOT_ mix together!

> Many packages have  > 1  stable version available,
> so users might have KDE 3.4.3 (all) & 3.5.1 (parts) by now,
> with the rest of 3.5.1 & then some of 3.5.2 to follow soon.
KDE 3.5.1 is no more in portage, a part those packages which haven't changed 
with 3.5.2 and akregator that seems to have problems with 3.5.2 version, at 
least here.

> Any stable version of KDE will need  kdelibs kdebase ,
> but otherwise why can't the packages be made stable
> at least as each big downloadable file becomes ready, if not individually ?
Because they have to be stable at once. Period.

Can't go stable piece by piece. Period.
Can't. Period.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060506 Diego 'Flameeyes' Petten? wrote:
> On Saturday 06 May 2006 08:48, Philip Webb wrote:
>> I've seen this stated before, but why does it have to be "_at once_" ?
> Because 3.4 and 3.5 does _NOT_ mix together!

That's not an explanation: it merely restates your assertion.

>> Many packages have  > 1  stable version available,
>> so users might have KDE 3.4.3 (all) & 3.5.1 (parts) by now,
>> with the rest of 3.5.1 & then some of 3.5.2 to follow soon.
> KDE 3.5.1 is no more in portage,
> a part those packages which haven't changed with 3.5.2
> and akregator that seems to have problems with 3.5.2 version at least here.

Sorry, your sentence doesn't make sense as English.

>> Any stable version of KDE will need  kdelibs kdebase ,
>> but otherwise why can't the packages be made stable
>> at least as each big downloadable file becomes ready, if not individually ?
> Because they have to be stable at once. Period.
> Can't go stable piece by piece. Period.
> Can't. Period.

Again, you're simply repeating yourself without any attempt to explain.

Can anyone else offer an explanation for the claim
that all KDE packages (for one version) have to be stabilised together ?

-- 
========================,,============================================
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jakub Moc]

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Philip Webb wrote:
>>> Any stable version of KDE will need  kdelibs kdebase ,
>>> but otherwise why can't the packages be made stable
>>> at least as each big downloadable file becomes ready, if not individually ?
>> Because they have to be stable at once. Period.
>> Can't go stable piece by piece. Period.
>> Can't. Period.
> 
> Again, you're simply repeating yourself without any attempt to explain.
> 
> Can anyone else offer an explanation for the claim
> that all KDE packages (for one version) have to be stabilised together ?

Look - every such mail defers stabilizing KDE, it's getting really
annoying. No, they can't and won't be stabilized on a piece-by-piece
basis, that would result in failed dependencies and compilation
failures. Period, no need to discuss this. This has never been done,
can't be done now and won't be done in future. The whole KDE shebang
needs to go stable at once, together with many other non-KDE ebuilds
that it depends on. So please, stop wasting limited time of limited
number of Gentoo KDE maintainers by beating a dead horse.

TIA.

-- 
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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò posted
<200605061341.56971@enterprise.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org>, excerpted below, 
on Sat, 06 May 2006 13:41:50 +0200:

>> Any stable version of KDE will need  kdelibs kdebase , but otherwise why
>> can't the packages be made stable at least as each big downloadable file
>> becomes ready, if not individually ?
> Because they have to be stable at once. Period.
> 
> Can't go stable piece by piece. Period. Can't. Period.

Elucidating a bit for Philip.

You are likely aware that the packages forming kde-base are uncommonly
inter-dependent on each other.  That's because KDE by design is very
modular, with various pieces calling parts of other packages to do what
they do best, increasing code reuse and decreasing unnecessary duplication
and reimplementation of features. Most KDE users find that to be one of
its strong points.  However, what it means to a dev is that due to that
very high degree of interdependency, while a few packages could be version
pick-and-chosen at the user end and have it still basically work, that
cannot and will not be a general policy, because tracing bugs would then
be what would amount to an impossibility. Little dependencies not normally
seen and never tested because testing both upstream and at Gentoo is per
release, could and almost certainly would easily multiply bugs like the
tribbles of startrek -- without end. It's a QA and testing nightmare
that's easily avoidable by simply refusing to stabilize a release
piecemeal.

It's not just kdelibs and within the big category tarballs that the
problems occur, either.  In ordered to work properly, as you stated, many
of the newer components depend on the newer kdelibs as well.  So far so
good.  However, some will depend on various parts of kdebase (that's the
tarball from upstream, not the kde-base Gentoo category) as well. 
However, that's  not the end of it, because once you upgrade kdelibs and
parts of kdebase, you are now running anything /not/ upgraded on a
kdelibs/kdebase that it's never been tested with.  Further compounding the
problem, due to the interlinking of various components, it's actually very
likely you'd have an upgraded application trying to work with an old kpart
depending on an already upgraded part of kdebase depending on another part
that wasn't upgraded, depending on the upgraded kdelibs!  How on /earth/
do you propose to logically bugtrace /that/ sort of mess!?  The answer is,
it's simply not possible!  The /only/ sane policy under those
circumstances is to stabilize the entire release as a single unit.  If a
single part of it can't be stabilized, that means the entire release is
held back and cannot be stabilized.  Like it or not, that's simply part of
living with and working with KDE -- the flip-side of all those nice
features that interlock so well and work so seamlessly together.

That's the reasoning behind "Can't go stable piece by piece.  Period. 
Can't.  Period."  Indeed, in this case, "Can't.  Period." is  the absolute
truth, to the the point that to to a developer, no more need be said, as
it's simply uncontemplatable.  Take those assumptions away, and there's
simply nothing left to build upon or debug with.  You might as well be
trying to debug random bits -- the supporting logic and assumptions are
that far gone.

-- 
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and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Caleb Tennis]

> I understand you don't care about how many users you have, Gentoo is not a
> bussiness. But if I try to convince users about the current situation that
> is hard. I can't explain this, I really can't. My only answer is "put it
> in /etc/portage/package.keywords". But that one is growing very fast...
> One nice thing for users would be the addition of more metabugs for recent
> packages. I'd like to know why some packages are not stable, and I am not
> the only one. Adding a metabug instead of closing all requests for
> stabilization with wontfix/wontresolve is much more userfriendly.

I read and see that your intentions are good.

The KDE team is currently made of about 3 semi active people.  Our speed
is simply limited by the amount of time and resources we have to put into
maintenance.  I won't argue stability and ~keywords and whatnot, as it's
somewhat of a matter of opinion and interpretation.

But I will say this: if anyone feels as though something has stalled or
wants some explanation as to why the distribution isn't moving in a
certain direction, then your message should be tagged with the following
words:

"How can I help?"

Get involved.  It's the only way you will truly understand the magnitude
of a project like Gentoo.  KDE is a very small slice of the whole thing,
and yet it still requires a LOT of time.  We're always looking for help. 
If you need a place to start, pick out a bug report and try and fix it. 
You might spend 3-4 hours chasing the answer.  3-4 hours.  Can you imagine
sitting in front of your computer for 3-4 hours to solve a problem for
someone you don't know for no compensation?  And you may never even figure
it out!

So let's rephrase "why doesn't Gentoo have ZZZ" into "how can I help
Gentoo have ZZZ?".  Become empowered.  That's what will keep the
distribution great.


Caleb


My guess is that KDE 3.5.2 is probably ready for stabilization, but nobody
has the time to do it at the moment.  That's purely a guess, though.  Feel
free to open a stabilization tracker bug for it so we do have a place to
discuss it.


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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Bart Braem]

Caleb Tennis wrote:

> Get involved.  It's the only way you will truly understand the magnitude
> of a project like Gentoo.  KDE is a very small slice of the whole thing,
> and yet it still requires a LOT of time.  We're always looking for help.
> If you need a place to start, pick out a bug report and try and fix it.
> You might spend 3-4 hours chasing the answer.  3-4 hours.  Can you imagine
> sitting in front of your computer for 3-4 hours to solve a problem for
> someone you don't know for no compensation?  And you may never even figure
> it out!
> 
> So let's rephrase "why doesn't Gentoo have ZZZ" into "how can I help
> Gentoo have ZZZ?".  Become empowered.  That's what will keep the
> distribution great.
> 
> 
> Caleb
> 
> 
> My guess is that KDE 3.5.2 is probably ready for stabilization, but nobody
> has the time to do it at the moment.  That's purely a guess, though.  Feel
> free to open a stabilization tracker bug for it so we do have a place to
> discuss it.
> 
You know, that's why I came here. I opened a bug (#132213) where I suggested
to open a stabilization tracker bug if necessary and the bug was closed. I
was referred to this thread...
I feel that if more packages would have a stabilization tracker bug things
would be more clear for users. That would make it a lot easier to help
solve bugs. I users start asking for more stable packages you can refer
them to those bugs. And then they can help. And most probably I would help
more too. 
I don't have much spare time either, but if I want something done in my
distribution and I can help I would do that faster.

Bart

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Friday 05 May 2006 09:20, Bart Braem wrote:
> Firefox 1.5: 5 months (the entire world uses it now, in stable)

Still has open at least one open vulnerability I know of, still has memory 
management problems afaik. Despite that it's stable on some architectures. We 
have exactly one active dev working on the whole Mozilla stuff at the moment. 
Did you say you want to help?

> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this
> time) 

Still open issues, some upstream, some Gentoo related. Also the KDE team lost 
members the last months and is unfortunately not that active since a while. 
All the whining leaves me with the feeling that I'm less interested to work 
for you. The question "What can I do?" I do never hear. Stop whining, but 
decide to help or give another distro a try. These are your choices.


Carsten

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Bart Braem]

Carsten Lohrke wrote:

>> KDE 3.5.2: 1.5 months (I know our devs get prereleases, so we had this
>> time)
> 
> Still open issues, some upstream, some Gentoo related. Also the KDE team
> lost members the last months and is unfortunately not that active since a
> while. All the whining leaves me with the feeling that I'm less interested
> to work for you. The question "What can I do?" I do never hear. Stop
> whining, but decide to help or give another distro a try. These are your
> choices.
> 
(As I mentioned in another post, I did ask for a metabug to help.)
I have other OSS I work on. The "what can I do" question is not relevant
here because I simply can not make the commitment. I posted this questions
as a user, not all users have the time. 
And I'll try to repeat: I'm not whining, I'm just asking for a reason. I did
not know that some developpers left recently and now I understand the
situation. I did not know Gentoo had those problems. 

So my suggestions:
- Document the use of ~arch better. It seems to me that the arch tree is
more stable now and that the idea of ~arch which was very broken years ago
is now more stable. (I'm a user since 1.4rc3)
- Open more metabugs that document the requirements of stabilization for the
largest packages. Report about that policy to all users and actively ask
them to cooperate there.

Bart

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Richard Fish]

On 5/5/06, Carsten Lohrke <carlo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> All the whining leaves me with the feeling that I'm less interested to work
> for you. The question "What can I do?" I do never hear. Stop whining, but
> decide to help or give another distro a try. These are your choices.

Just to try to counter some of the whining, I am sure that most users
do appreciate the work that you do for little glory and even less pay.
 And I think you did the right thing by holding off on stabilization
this long.  Yeah, I know, not as good as a "how can I help?", but my
day job is keeping me busy with 60 hour weeks atm....

Cheers,
-Richard

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Philip Webb]

060504 Michael Kirkland wrote:
> I think the problem is that Gentoo is falling into the same sandtrap
> the Debian project has been mired in forever.
> "arch" and "~arch" are polarizing into "stable, but horribly out of date"
> and "maybe it will work".  This leads to people trying to maintain
> a frankenstinian /etc/portage/package.keywords file,
> constantly adding to it & never knowing when things can be removed from it.

That's very much my own impression.  I am now using ~x86 versions of
Vim Vim-core Gvim Cdargs Openoffice Eix Euses Gqview Gwenview Portage
Firefox Galeon Htop KDE -- all of which which I use regularly -- 
& Abiword Gnumeric Koffice Gnugo Qgo Qalculate-kde (which I rarely use).
I have had no problem with any of them.

My solution is a line in  .bashrc :
  'alias emergeu='ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge' ,
which allows me to emerge a testing version on a specific occasion.
The  package.keywords  alternative is silly,
as there's no reason anyone would want to do it regularly for a package,
as opposed to occasionally when -- increasingly -- stabilisation is late.

I do a weekly 'eix-sync' & check the list of packages which have changed,
then decide which ones to update; I never do 'emerge world'.
I keep an upto-date file with a line for each package I have installed,
incl date, version & the main dependencies it satisfies (if any):
this is my alternative to 'world', which is clumsy & causes problems.

I have been doing this since I started using Gentoo in Oct 2003
& have never had any problem with Portage or packages as a result.

> I would suggest opening a middle ground tag,
> where things can be moved to from "~arch"
> when they work for reasonable configuration values,
> but still have open bugs for some people.

I suggested this earlier, but got only nonsense for a reply.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@chass.utoronto.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Philip Webb posted <20060505073706.GB6335@sympatico.ca>, excerpted below, 
on Fri, 05 May 2006 03:37:06 -0400:

> That's very much my own impression.  I am now using ~x86 versions of Vim
> Vim-core Gvim Cdargs Openoffice Eix Euses Gqview Gwenview Portage Firefox
> Galeon Htop KDE -- all of which which I use regularly -- & Abiword
> Gnumeric Koffice Gnugo Qgo Qalculate-kde (which I rarely use). I have had
> no problem with any of them.
> 
> My solution is a line in  .bashrc :
>   'alias emergeu='ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge' ,
> which allows me to emerge a testing version on a specific occasion. The 
> package.keywords  alternative is silly, as there's no reason anyone would
> want to do it regularly for a package, as opposed to occasionally when --
> increasingly -- stabilisation is late.
> 
> I do a weekly 'eix-sync' & check the list of packages which have changed,
> then decide which ones to update; I never do 'emerge world'. I keep an
> upto-date file with a line for each package I have installed, incl date,
> version & the main dependencies it satisfies (if any): this is my
> alternative to 'world', which is clumsy & causes problems.
> 
> I have been doing this since I started using Gentoo in Oct 2003 & have
> never had any problem with Portage or packages as a result.

Here, I simply use ~amd64 for my entire system, and rarely have problems. 
When I do, that's what those backup snapshot partitions I keep around are
for.

Gentoo is really fairly conservative with ~arch.  That does /not/ mean the
package is broken, or the upstream package is unstable.  Rather, it means
the upstream package is reasonably stable, and the Gentoo ebuild is known
to work and is tested at least by the Gentoo maintainer.

Really broken packages and packages known to have very serious issues on
Gentoo aren't ~arch at all, but are instead hard-masked, either with the
-* keyword, or with an entry in package.mask.

Given these facts, I'm of the opinion that most of those running stable
that are calling for faster package stabilization, should really be
running ~arch.  That's doubly true for those finding they have an
ever-growing package.keywords and/or those calling for a "middle" keyword.
In point of fact, ~arch /is/ that middle keyword, because the really
unstable packages are hard-masked and not in ~arch in the first place.

Actually, I run selected hard-masked packages as well.  Particularly with
things like gcc, which is slotted and easily managed with gcc-config or
eselect compiler, it's quite easy to run hard-masked stuff in parallel. 
Something like xorg isn't as easy to run in parallel as it's not slotted,
but even there, given FEATURES=buildpkg, if one has the time and
motivation to test a masked version,  it's relatively painless to revert
to an old version if the test doesn't work out so well (with the caveat of
course that one keeps backups, as one should anyway, in case something
goes /really/ wrong -- it IS hard-masked packages we are talking about
now, after all).

Again, I don't see the problem.  Stable is there for those that want it.
~arch is there for those that want something newer, with a bit of extra
risk.  Hard-masked-for-testing packages are very often there for those who
REALLY want bleeding edge -- along with the associated increase in risk. 
If folks don't like how far behind stable is, and are willing to risk not
only their own systems with the package in its current state, but the
systems of everyone else running stable (which is what requesting faster
stabilization actually comes down to), they shouldn't be running stable
after all, but the "middle" keyword, that being ~arch.  That way, they get
their newer, mostly stable programs, while everyone who /really/ wants
stable doesn't end up with the risk of stabilizing the package too fast. 
Of course, note that package.keywords works both ways.  Folks running
~arch as their regular keyword can set specific packages to arch (stable)
in package.keywords too.  Again, Gentoo is very flexible in that regard --
some might say insanely flexible, but it works, if people would only read
the docs and follow them as appropriate.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Jan Kundrát]

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Philip Webb wrote:
> My solution is a line in  .bashrc :
>   'alias emergeu='ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge' ,

Don't do that. Try to do a search on "why is ACCEPT_KEYWORDS emerge bad".

> which allows me to emerge a testing version on a specific occasion.
> The  package.keywords  alternative is silly,
> as there's no reason anyone would want to do it regularly for a package,

Please RTFM [1]. You'll learn that you are allowed to use (not limited
to) versioned identifiers, for example.

[1]
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3&chap=3#doc_chap2_sect2

Cheers.
-jkt

-- 
cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Marius Mauch]

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On Thu, 04 May 2006 16:29:56 -0700
Michael Kirkland <mpkirkland@shaw.ca> wrote:

> I would suggest opening a middle ground tag, where things can be
> moved to from "~arch" when they work for reasonable configuration
> values, but still have open bugs for some people.

More work for devs, yay!</sarcasm>

Marius

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In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.

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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Duncan]

Bart Braem posted <e3cplj$jv3$1@sea.gmane.org>, excerpted below,  on Thu,
04 May 2006 13:48:03 +0200:

> As a user I have to add my opinion here. I have been using Gentoo for some
> years now and it was always fairly up to date. Currently KDE is really
> behind on the current situation upstream. 
> And then I wonder why. What makes us think we can not trust the KDE devs?
> Does compiling KDE introduce so many bugs? I mean, let's be serious, all
> other distributions have a stable 3.5.x now. Don't they experience all
> those horrible bugs?
> Seriously, this is really becoming an issue. As I pointed out in a bug I
> filed for a stable KDE (for which I apologize, I should have looked here
> first), some people are leaving Gentoo because of this slow upgrade
> process.


I'm just another user, not a dev.  Please keep that in mind as you read
the following.

That KDE was two releases behind, even on cooker for AMD64 (which
unfortunately followed stable for i586, not cooker for i586), was the
reason I left Mandrake, so I know exactly where you are coming from.

That said, you've hit a sore spot -- illogical people asking for
something, choosing it when given the choice, and then when they get it,
complaining about what they chose in the first place, when the other
choice remains right at hand for them to change their mind and switch to
at any point!  Exactly that -- illogical!

/Why/ are people leaving over this??  The ebuilds are there in ~arch and
have been for some time. If people want cutting edge, Gentoo continues to
provide pretty damn close, often having (still masked because upstream
isn't available at the time) ebuilds in the tree even before public
release, as I know for a fact has been the case with KDE, as I've seen the
ebuilds and the masks there, before the releases, complete with the reason
for masking given as upstream not released yet.

Stable is there if they want it, too.  They can choose to run stable. 
There's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with
making an informed decision to run unstable. If they want to leave for
some other distribution, for whatever reason, that's fine and good. There
are legitimate reasons to do so, places (like binary packages and
periodic releases with few updates between them) where Gentoo isn't as
strong, because it chooses other areas to emphasize. Deciding to stick
with (IMO consistently outdated, but hey, if people want stable...)
stable, then being unhappy with devs for not choosing to stable-keyword
something with known issues, isn't such a legitimate reason, when they
have the choice to upgrade at any time they choose, regardless of stable
status, as the ebuilds are there for them to do so and the general Gentoo
documentation is clear in its instructions as to how to do so, if desired. 

It's up to an admin whether they want to risk running unstable on nothing,
individual packages, whole categories (kde-base) of packages, or their
entire system.  Why then are those same admins complaining when devs take
their responsibility to do the best they can to ensure something's stable
before marking it such, seriously.  I can envision the /same/ admins
complaining that the devs didn't do their job if the issues remained and
the packages were stabilized even with known issues.

As for trusting or not the KDE devs, that's not the issue.  Either there
are still known problems  on Gentoo, or there aren't.  It doesn't matter
if those were upstream problems or Gentoo problems, in this case, only
whether there are problems on Gentoo or not. As it happens, many of the
problems with 3.5.0 were upstreamm and have been resolved with 3.5.1 or
3.5.2. That took time. 3.5.0 won't ever make stable as it has issues since
fixed with further upstream releases. 3.5.1 likely won't either. 3.5.2 has
fixed many/most of them, but it hasn't been much more than 30 days since
its release, and Gentoo normally requires a package to be bug-free for 30
days in ~arch before going stable, so it's only now qualified.

Meanwhile, those who want to risk running the unstable packages and are
willing to live with or provide patches for the bugs (bugs which after
all are there in bugzilla, if anyone wants to know what the holdup is)...
can do just that since the ebuilds are there from the day of release and
often even /before/ release!  That they don't choose to do so is their
choice and their responsibility, not that of Gentoo.

Note that due to Gentoo slotting, it's not even necessary to give up the
stable KDE to merge the still unstable version!  With slots, they can
exist quite well in parallel.

Now it'd be rather different if the ebuilds weren't there.  As I said, I
left Mandrake over such things.  However, they /are/ there.  The choice to
merge them or not is the user/admin's.  If they chose not to do so, why
are they then blaming Gentoo for their own choice?

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Guillaume Pujol]

I'm just an user here, but I'd like to ask a simple question:
For Gnome 2.14 there is a tracker bug on b.g.o [1]. I think this is
really usefull for users like me who want to know the status of this
release at any time (and I hope this is useful for devs too :)). Why
such a tracker doesn't exist for KDE 3.5 ? That way, users may easily
see why KDE still isn't stable.
Please don't take this as a reproach. Perhaps you devs have no need
for a tracker, and I can perfectly understand that.

Regards,
Guillaume

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119872

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Richard Fish]

On 5/4/06, Bart Braem <bart.braem@gmail.com> wrote:
> What makes us think we can not trust the KDE devs?

1. bugs.gentoo.org
2. bugs.kde.org

I personally have been running KDE 3.5 since the RC days...when you
actually had to add it to package.unmask.  And *yes*, it has had more
than it's share of problems.  Even 3.5.1 had an annoying bug that
caused a kicker segfault every time I logged out.  3.5.2 is the first
3.5 that  seems completely stable.

Honestly, if you want it sooooo badly, add the necessary entries to
package.keywords, merge it, and be happy.  What is this obsession with
pushing the Gentoo devs to mark things stable before they feel it is
right to do so??  Is it just some pointless quest to have a completely
"stable" system??

-Richard

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Tuesday 04 April 2006 11:12, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> Surely the question isn't whether the upgrade is perfect, but whether
> it's better than the current stable release?

Exactly.

> (I realise that isn't a perfect patch count...)

Exactly.

> I think at this point it does more harm than good to be lagging behind
> the current upstream kde - last time I checked the kde bugzilla
> wouldn't even accept bug reports for the kde currently marked stable
> as it was too old, and if bugs can't be filed then it's clearly
> "unsupported upstream" and time to upgrade.

KDE 3.5.0/1 had grave bugs, leaving users with lost addressbooks and such. KDE 
3.5.2 is not even out of our 30 days testing period and I have still a few 
patches enqueued to be applied. I can live with users complaining, but that 
doesn't mean it's not going on ones nerve. Especially when developers fall 
into the chorus, it's getting uneasy.

It's ready, when it's ready. Really.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] When will KDE 3.5 be marked as stable?

[Wernfried Haas]

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Maybe your answer has already been answered somewhere in this thread,
here are some threads on the forums on this issue (some are about
older versions, but the reasons are likely the same):
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-335187.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-446306.html

Searching for "kde stable" in all forums or just the duplicate threads
forum should yield in some more probably useful hits.

cheers,
	Wernfried

-- 
Wernfried Haas (amne) - amne at gentoo dot org
Gentoo Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org
IRC: #gentoo-forums on freenode - email: forum-mods at gentoo dot org

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