On Saturday 01 September 2007 22:10:44 Tero Pesonen wrote:
Relating to the topic of recent openSUSE KMail packages and stability
issues, now discussed on the list.
I've been wondering which of these openSUSE KDE packages are actually
stable. There's this stable(?) KDE3 repository alongside the Community,
Backport, KDE4 etc.
That depends what you mean by stable. The most stable, in terms of
predictable changes happening to the packages, are the ones in 10.2. The
most stable at the software level are generally the latest and greatest from
the build service, which will have more bugfixes than the 10.2 packages, but
may have regressions.
But the packages there are being updated almost weekly. I have no idea if
I should or should not update to the latest packages, which seem to be
something in between 3.5.7 and 3.5.8
That sounds to me like you're interested in package stability. If it ain't
broken, don't fix it, so stay with the 10.2 packages, then upgrade to 10.3
when it comes out. Critical bugs in 10.2 will of course be fixed via online
update.
How can one tell when these packages are stable? Or are they ever. It
seems, according to the changelogs of the RPM's, that they are constantly
changing. The new packages seem to fix something that went broken in the
last version, while adding something new which, one can only wonder,
could prove to be the next thing broken and so forth.
The KDE:KDE packages from the buildservice are relatively stable since KDE 3.5
is frozen. They are the last KDE 3 packages from the kde.org repository, but
track the SVN by means of a diff between the released tarball and the
repository.
KDE 3 forms an exception. In this case, we're currently in the middle of
switching from the KDE main branch tarballs to the Enterprise Branch. This
more stable, more actively maintained branch of kdepim created for enterprise
use means that for future openSUSE releases using KDE 3, the kdepim3
that we use will benefit from more scrutiny and QA by a group of
companies and distros with business interests in KDE PIM.
However, the process of switching the suse customisations to the sources from
main branch to enterprise for 10.3 has created a few hiccups and these are
visible to you in the buildservice as the 10.3 work in progress gets synced
out to the build service.
Mine are release 43.1 and I've been happy with them, (unlike the version
before them), and have not dared to upgrade anything KDE related after I
upgraded to these, as I'm not sure if the newer packages would be as
stable as these are. On the other hand, I have no idea what I would gain
from the newer packages either.
The question therefore is: When 3.5.8 will be released, how can I tell
which will be the best 3.5.8 release to upgrade to? Are the first
packages that will become available the closest to the vanilla 3.5.8
provided by kde dot org, and if so, should I grab them... or will they
contain SUSE-specific features that may or may not cause issues that
would get addressed in future 3.5.8 releases under KDE3/ repository?
The SUSE packages always contain customisations consisting of a) bugfixes or
improvements that for reasons of translation, feature freeze or impact
couldn't be applied directly to the central KDE repository at the time we
packaged and b) SUSE specific alterations that adapt the packages to the SUSE
infrastructure the packages are designed to run on.
a) type changes tend to migrate upstream over time. b) type changes don't.
The set of customisations/patches applied are carried over between KDE point
releases. Before a point release we try to upstream as many patches as
possible, but some don't make it for a variety of reasons.
Whether vanilla kde dot org tarballs or SUSE packages are better for you is
subjective. We at SUSE work very hard to make what we feel are worthwhile
improvements to the base packages from kde.org that we feel increase the
value of the software to the user. You may disagree about that if you hold
the belief that vanilla packages are always of high quality and distro
customisations tend to mess them up.
One example of how I've added to the kdepim packages is by improving the
offline mode implementation so that on going offline, KMail terminates any
running jobs. So if you suspend the computer, then restart, KMail won't
complain a few minutes after restarting that it could not contact your IMAP
server since the IMAP process still thought it was talking to the server via
the network connection you had before suspending. This was too late for KDE
3.5's freeze so probably won't go upstream except to KDE 4.
I'll try and formulate all this more generally and put it on the opensuse wiki
somewwhere.
Another question: Are the changes between these releases explained
somewhere?
rpm -q kdepim3 --changelog is actually a better guide to what differs between
than the packages' release number.
