[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions: DE's, fallback and stability.

[P. Christeas]

On Sunday 24 October 2010, Renaud MICHEL wrote:
> On samedi 23 octobre 2010 at 22:55, Michael Scherer wrote :
> > then wouldn't it be better to have a way for kde to work when being too
> > broken ( ie, a safe mode, like windows and firefox ) ?
+++
 
> You can "fix" a KDE configuration problem by removing (or renaming if there
> are some important things to get back) the .kde(4) directory.
> A newbie can do that, if he still has access to a file manager.
 --

That's what my provocative message was frankly intended to point out.
Having system components which are fail-tolerant themselves, makes a secondary 
DE obsolete. But, having GUI-dependant components, which are also fail-prone, 
introduces this need to bloat our installations with duplicates.

The simple answer would be to have the _distros demand stability from upstream 
projects_. Additionally, the distros (as final selectors of software) should 
prefer the projects which have sound policies about error-handling and 
degraded-mode operation.

Stability, IMHO, is not what Debian does: take 7 versions back and call them 
"stable". It is the result of software quality procedures, objective choices 
when deciding about code merges, "software engineering" when developing 
something.



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