Re: [gentoo-user] Re: KDE 4.3.95 tarballs?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Monday 25 January 2010 23:11:18 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> > Today it is finally released. I don't know why it took so long. :)
> 
> It's a bit sad though that an open source project keeps secrets...  I 
> found out that the tarballs were available for days now but only for 
> maintainers of KDE packages of various distros.  For example Arch Linux 
> had RC2 binaries available in its [kde-unstable] repo since Jan 21, but 
> no one would give a link to the tarballs used to build the sources 
> because they are "secret".
> 
> Am I the only one to find this frustrating (to say the least)?

There's nothing secret here. Nothing to see, move along folks. 

The code is always available in svn, if you wanted it that bad you could have 
checked it out. It's common release engineering practice to build a tarball 
from the repo and provide limited access to *those* files to distros and 
mirrors to give them time to sync and build their binaries before making them 
available to the public. I mirror Ubuntu and Fedora. The deal is that I get 
the rpms and debs two days before the public does. This is so that every 
official mirror on the planet is ready to simultaneously publish the release 
*all*at*the*same*time*.

This is a very excellent way of working. You have no idea how much chaos 
thousands of eager beaver users cause pounding away at my inbox if I don't 
have the latest Ubuntu for them the day it is released because sharks bit the 
undersea cable to London and the inbound bandwidth slows to a crawl. I'm not 
making this up - stuff like this happens.

Gentoo erred in publishing ebuilds for tarballs that were not generally 
available yet.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com