[Mageia-dev] GNOME 3.2 or 3.4 for Mageia 2?

[Olav Vitters]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 05:52:06PM +0200, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
> Le vendredi 30 septembre 2011 15:00:45, Olav Vitters a écrit :
> > On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 09:33:59PM +0200, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
> > > However, how great is GNOME 3.4 going to be as compared to 3.2.2 ? :)
> > 
> > For me it is multiple things:
> > 1. More stable; The more people use a recent version of GNOME, more
> >    fixes will go into GNOME and long term GNOME is more stable
> > 
> >    Basically: if your GNOME version is old, developers spend less time
> >    on it, because they assume the issue is probably fixed. So, IMO, to
> >    ensure GNOME stays at a high quality, you have to provide a recent
> >    version... staying 1 version behind only works for short term (the
> >    "Release early, release often" mindset).
> 
> Did I misunderstand , or is GNOME 3.2 not going to have any fixes after 3.2.2, 
> although 3.4 will still not be ready at that time, leaving users with several 
> months without any fixes ? I would understand that 3.2 would stop being 
> supported a few months after 3.4 is out, but if really support stops *before*, 
> that's puzzling :)

Nothing new, has been like this for various releases. We did use to do a
.3 release, but it takes quite a lot of time to do that, and we didn't
see the benefit. No distro also complained to GNOME for the lack of a .3
release.

Note that it only relates to whole of GNOME, if a maintainer wants to
make another release, they're free to do so. Most do not though, but
some do.

> For small projects, I can understand that developers always want to you to use 
> the latest (lastest stable version at least), but for bigger projects such as 
> a DE, I would find it surprising. We all know that once a major version has 
> been released, it will have users for years. 

I think you're getting the intention wrong. GNOME 3.2 is a bugfix for
3.0; 3.4 is a bugfix for 3.2. If distributions want to rely on an older
version, that is nice, but as it is their choice.

> When users report a bug in Mageia 1, we don't tell them "use cauldron, it's 
> fixed them": we try to fix it in Mageia 1.

GNOME is not a distribution. We cannot get any fix to the user. Always
up to the distro. So as we cannot provide such a service anyway, a
distribution has to do it. And they do sometimes cherrypick commits.
-- 
Regards,
Olav