GNOME updates vs. KDE updates

[Gilboa Davara]

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