> 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. And Linus Torvalds was recently quoted as encouraging users to switch to KDE. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12956
