On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 01:26:17PM +0200, cobaco wrote: > > and why on stable you do not expect a stable KDE? > kde 3.2. will be the stable kde release come 8 december
The reality is that if KDE 3.2 is stable in KDE, and it entered testing on December 8th, it would probably delay the release of sarge by at least 6 weeks just so we can make sure the Debian build of KDE 3.2 was bug-free. And then in the meantime, no doubt some other significant package (GNOME, perhaps?) would become "stable", and people would agitate for us to hold up the release for another 6 weeks, OR developers would take the opportunity to destablize the release further because they see the vast major, gaping exception to the freeze schedule set forth by the RM. AND this all assumes that KDE actually hits their release schedulate! Bad ju-ju. The real problem is that stable has a reputation of taking years and years before we manage to do a release, so people are always desperate to shove every last bit of functionality and new upstream release into it. What folks don't realize is that makes the problem worse, not better, by stretching out the release schedule. Better to have a hard freeze schedule, and then try to turn out new stable releases every 6-9 months. Then folks won't be so desperate to shove new things in and screw up the release. The problem, though, is the first such attempt take release schedules seriously and agressively (a) a really hardass RM, and (b) a certain amount of faith by the developers that we really can get our act together about short, regular, predictable releases. - Ted