On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 15:55, David Pashley wrote: > KDE 3.0.3 is packaged and apart from a KDE 3.0.4 release, the KDE 3.0.x > branch is pretty much finished packaging wise. calc and others are now > working on KDE 3.1 packaging. > > KDE 3.x will be in sid once the GCC transition plan has been worked out > and started. This is kind of out of our hands. I understand that the GCC transition is not under your control, and please understand that my criticism applies to the entire process, not just the KDE packaging. I would love to see more information concerning the GCC process as well. I have read the technical material concerning the transition, but a laymens, 20000 foot view, with approximate dates and places to go find new information to track the process, would be wonderful. However, it would still be very useful to know how the KDE transition will be handled. For example, I would be more than happy to add the 3.0.x packages to the set we use here at work and upgrade, if I could be sure that the transition from non-sid to sid would be smooth and relatively trouble free. As it stands, the only assurance I have of a relatively trouble free upgrade comes from the fact that packages get accepted into the sid tree. Being in the "main" tree means that "Debian people" put more effort into making sure things "work". I am probably misunderstanding how this process works. My current understanding tells me that packages outside of the "blessed" (main, contrib, etc etc) sources are pretty much "use at your own risk", and as such I'm unwilling to deploy them to the people I have to support (to be fair, I'm unwilling to suggest it to the wonderful support person who does that job). Not to be a pedant, but if there was information put forth and assurances made about package quality, ability to upgrade, and effort put forth to make sure the experimental packages alligned with the final "official" packages, I would move today. I hope I'm explaining this properly, please let me know if I'm not making sense. Side note : After typing all this up, and reading other emails from people, it would seem that there are quite a few non-developer/non-admin types that use Debian. Debian, as a whole, is easy to maintain and use, but the problems come in when things fail and the non-developers don't know where to go or what to do. As one of these people, I appreciate the efforts of everyone involved to help me get up to speed and informed, and I have learned quite a bit from the people surrounding Debian. In many cases, I'm willing to trust Debian to "take care of me", but I would like to be able to make informed decisions about package and system choice (Should I upgrade to package X? Does it have current support? Is the package maintainer active and responsive?), and to do that I need to know what's going on with the developers and packagers behind the scenes. I understand that this is, mainly, my responsibility to find these people and engage them, but I would say that Debian's (maybe unstated) goal of being widely used would be greatly helped by visibility throughout the process (I'll need to build a list of questions that I'm asked frequently about Debian, as it may help define what people want to see in terms of "visibility"). I'm willing to help out building this, if I can be of help. Thanks, Matt
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