The next thrilling episode of "KDE version in Lenny: KDE 3.5.9 vs KDE 4.1"

[Achim Bohnet]

On Tuesday, 10. June 2008, Matthew Rosewarne wrote: 
[...]
> While there are valid concerns with matters of missing features or 
> obsolescence, I see the two greatest issues in this decision being 
> maintainability and (wo)manpower.  While there are certainly other reasons to 
> release with 4.1, those are the two issues I see as being critical, since 
> they ultimately decide the viability of having KDE in Debian.
>
> By maintainability, I'm primarily referring to the lack of upstream 
> maintenance of the KDE 3 branch.  For example, there are libraries used by
[..cut..]

I dare to disagree ;) IMHO the KDE3 lack of maintainabilty and required
manpower is FUD ;) Lemme try to prove it:

When the debian release is out, 'all' you still get then for lenny is:

	o security fixes
	o fixes for data loss bugs

Where do you expect to see more of them:

	o in the solid KDE 3.5.9
	o in KDE 4.1.0 with much new code

The KDE3 svn branch sees roughly one bugfix per day.  SuSE, Redhat Enterprise,
etc, will have to fix security/dataloss bugs for 3.5.9 for more year than lenny
will be maintained.

Where do you expect KDE SVN merges of security and dataloss fixes to be easier:

	o feature frozen 3.5 BRANCH aka 3.5.9 svn -> 3.5.9 as in lenny
or
        o from 4.5.* 4.4.* 4.3.* 4.2.* -> a (theoretical) 4.1 in lenny

So my obvious(?) conclusion:  maintainability and manpower for 3.5.9 in
lenny is much lower than for a 4.1 in lenny.  IMHO: Q.E.D


Of course all 'serious' distro will have to have 4.* pkgs.  But the advantage
of not having 4.1 in lenny itself but in another repo is that you can
concentrate on 4.1+n as soon as it's released and 'forget' about 4.1.  And
that's what the I-wants-KDE4-user-base wants to have: the latest 4.x.y.


Achim

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