GNOME updates vs. KDE updates

[Charles Howse]

> 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