next level of freedesktop.org

[Waldo Bastian]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thursday 17 July 2003 11:10, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > 3. Platform Release
> > ===
> > You can easily get bad combinations of these tarballs;
> > fontconfig/freetype combinations that are no good, for example.  Plus,
> > it's annoying for people to track the version numbers and releases of
> > all these sub-modules.
>
> Where people == users or distributions? (or both)
>
> > My proposal is that we do a versioned release that defines the
> > expected shared underpinnings of the desktops, toolkits, and major
> > applications. This will let us depend on simply "desktop platform
> > release 3.0" for example, rather than specifying a lot of individual
> > components.
>
> That could prove politically interesting, esp once you start getting
> groups pulling both ways - developers and bleeding edge users who want
> updates twice a year, and corporate types who don't.
>
> > The goal of a coordinated release will obviously be more useful as we
> > have more shared underpinnings in the platform. But I think it's worth
> > starting to work toward.
>
> Yes.... I think that could work. The LSB certainly missed this target by
> a light year or two, it's probably worth a shot here.

I think the primary value of this would be to ensure that such released 
"desktop platform" does indeed work with all the various desktop environments 
/ desktop applications.

It can now happen that a new GNOME 2.7 requires a new libxslt 2.7.8 but that 
for some reason libxslt 2.7.8 breaks KDE 3.5. Sure, we all try to stay 
backwards (binary) compatible, but bugs do happen and maybe KDE 3.5 relied on 
some undocumented behavior.

By having a platform release all interested parties have a chance to do proper 
testing with that particular combination.

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE/Fp48N4pvrENfboIRAhLUAKCXobRMELffh51FGV3PxwXu28yzvwCbBucv
ymSlPBHkflu2ocxEECHD8+E=
=i9X6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----