Heya,
I certainly agree with some of things you said, as I also believe that
Debian could profit from better management and/or planning in some
areas, I don't think this would have made the timely release of etch
possible.
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> Back in September, it seemed impossible to the GNOME team to bring GNOME
> 2.16 into a releasable state before the planned release date. We took
> then the hard decision to keep GNOME 2.14 and bring only the few parts
> of 2.16 that weren't disruptive (meaning especially, no gtk+ 2.10 and no
> gnome-vfs transition to dbus).
>
> It should be obvious now that, with the delays the release is facing,
> this decision was wrong. With the icon themes fixing, I think the last
> showstopper for GNOME 2.16 is now fixed.
The point is that pushing Gnome 2.16 into the release would have taken
even more time from the release team (and you and other maintainers), so
that we would release at an even later point. And then the KDE team
would come up and say that KDE 3.5.6 would be nice to have in etch. And
XFCE 4.4 was also released recently, so we should probably have included
it too. And by that point, etch would have been so late that Gnome 2.18
would be a candidate...
> Of course, at the time it became clear it would be possible to polish
> 2.16 before the release, the distribution was already frozen. The
> result is, we have a desktop with less bugs, more features and speed
> improvements, which is almost completely ready (apart from evince) for
> the upcoming stable release, and it's not going to be
> shipped. Currently it is only used by a handful of people running
> experimental.
Right. The problem is that a large number of users would find a large
number of bugs, which would show unexpected problems.
Marc
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