KDE vs. GNOME on F10

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 20:00 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > As I said, the particular code isn't the issue. We ship a kernel API. At
> > present, we consider it fine to break that API in stable releases. This
> > is not something that would be considered 'stable' in a traditional
> > definition. The kernel's just an example, we do the same kind of
> > non-stable updates all over the place. That's the issue I'm trying to
> > talk about, not just the specific example I happened to mention. Please
> > don't bog down in specifics.
> 
> Well, the specifics are that packages both within Fedora and in third-party 
> repositories which depend on the bumped API usually get rebuilt (and patched 
> if needed) fairly quickly, normally before the update even goes stable. Of 
> course that's only possible for software which can be patched, which is just 
> another example of how binary-only software is broken by design.

But we're providing an operating system, not just a bunch of packages.
What if some group's written their own kernel module for their own
purposes, rolled it out to all their systems, and doesn't expect an
official update to make them re-write it? Same question for KDE -
someone writes a tool for their group based on some KDE libraries,
doesn't expect an update to come along and do a major KDE version bump
and break some interface the tool relied on...reducing the question to
'are all the packages we care about okay' is, again, excluding some use
cases, i.e. defining an identity for Fedora.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net