On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 17:38 +0000, D. D. Brierton wrote: > I see that KDE 3.5.0 for FC4 was released on updates-released. That's > very nice for the KDE users, but I was slightly surprised by it. The > reason I am surprised by it is that no such updates are ever released > for GNOME, which is the default desktop on FC. > > Now I can understand that making FC4 packages of GNOME 2.12.0 is just > too big a job (it would require upgrading a lot of system level packages > such as HAL, etc.), although similar considerations would, I'd have > thought, apply to upgrading from KDE 3.4 to 3.5. > > But we don't even get the bug-fix/maintenance releases either. I have a > fully updated FC4 box and it has GNOME 2.10.0. A quick look here: > > http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/platform/2.10/ > > shows that 2.10.1 was released in April 2005 and 2.10.2 was released in > July 2005. > > So I really would like to know, how come Red Hat developers have time to > ship a major update to KDE but not even maintenance releases for GNOME? > > Best, Darren Far from it. As someone that just finished building KDE 3.5 RPMs for x86_64 (based on KDE-RedHat's SRPMs) I can fully appreciate the amount of work required to get KDE 3.5 built. KDE is self-sufficient. You just need to build 14 base packages (+ language packs) that don't really depend on anything outside KDE. Build at -> arts -> kdelibs -> kdebase -> kde* -> language -> install. GNOME on the other hand, is a huge mess to upgrade, even when using garnom. Last time I counted, GNOME had around of 120 (!!!) packages, with weird cross-dependencies between them. It's far from being the same task. (Last time I tried using it, back in FC2 days, I ended up with a dead system on my hands.) Just compare KDE source packages: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.5/src/ To GNOME packages: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/Public/gnome/sources BTW, Slackware recently (10.2) dropped GNOME citing too-complex building requirements as a reason. Gilboa
