GNOME Vs KDE upgradeability.

[Gain Paolo Mureddu]

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    I write to this list out of a discussion held on both the Fedora
Forum.org site and on the Marketing list. Before I get down to the
details, I think a bit of background is in order.

    First of all, I'm no formal programmer nor developer, I'm merely a
user (a power user, if you will) with basic C and scarse programming
knowledge at best, but no formal C nor programmin in general training
whatsoever. I'm an avid GNOME user and have been a Red Hat Linux user
for quite some time, starting back in late 90s with Red Hat 5, and
I've kept "close to home" with Fedora. What does all this has to do
with the fedora-desktop list? Keep reading, please.

    With the update of KDE to version 3.5 for Fedora Core 4, I noticed
a tendency on Red Hat/Fedora's side, which I found strange, and did
(and still do) not understand: Why is KDE upgradeable and GNOME seems
to always lag behind? It then it struck me like lightning: This was
not the first time this question has been asked, and more importantly
it as also been discussed on public forums, and I have even
participated of those discussions... However, now I find myself asking
the same question and for the first time the commonly given answers
don't quite satisfy me, so put another way: Why isn't GNOME
update-able in between Red Hat/Fedora releases? Usually the answer
given was the degree of complexity of the software and the amount of
packages it touches, which in itself would warrant a whole distro
upgrade, where as KDE is more monolithic and as such is easier to
maintain. I'm not saying that this holds true today, nor that it has
even been true before. Just that these are commonly given answers to
the question.

    So I still don't quite grasp why *exactly* is GNOME so much more
complex in comparison to KDE, or why does it has so many components
"broken-out" into smaller packages, which in turn seem to be exactly
what holds back GNOME from inclusion of newer versions to the
distribution... In this sense, it would seem as if GNOME's modularity
was its Achilles' ankle, for upgrades in a current Fedora/Red Hat
release, anyway.

    It has been no surprise that Red Hat in the past, and now Fedora's
development seem tied to GNOME's development cycle (I'm not saying
that this is the case, like publicly sated about Ubuntu, for example;
is only coincidence). However, since the release of Red Hat Network
(RHN) I don't remember (not that there has not been one) a whole GNOME
update available from RHN, while I do remember various ocations for
KDE and its libraries... Seems odd.

    What prevents that GNOME upgrades could be released as an update
from RHN or via yum repositories? The lifespan of a Fedora
distribution before moving to Legacy and support ceased from the
traditional channles is of about 1 year, which means at least two
GNOME revisions (one every 6 months on fixed dates). This, I think, is
important as not only these new GNOME revisions add features (and some
bugs too), but also solve some  other bugs.

    I don't mean to start a GNOME Vs KDE flamewar or anything like
that, we've already had our share of those on other channels, but to
know why is this the case with GNOME and new versions not making their
way into current release versions before they are moved to Legacy,
that's all.

Thanks in advance for any input.
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