[gentoo-user] Re: KDE 4.3.95 tarballs?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 01/26/2010 12:06 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> On Montag 25 Januar 2010, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On Monday 25 January 2010 23:11:18 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>>>> Today it is finally released. I don't know why it took so long. :)
>>>
>>> It's a bit sad though that an open source project keeps secrets...  I
>>> found out that the tarballs were available for days now but only for
>>> maintainers of KDE packages of various distros.  For example Arch Linux
>>> had RC2 binaries available in its [kde-unstable] repo since Jan 21, but
>>> no one would give a link to the tarballs used to build the sources
>>> because they are "secret".
>>>
>>> Am I the only one to find this frustrating (to say the least)?
>>
>> There's nothing secret here. Nothing to see, move along folks.
>>
>> The code is always available in svn, if you wanted it that bad you could
>>   have checked it out. It's common release engineering practice to build a
>>   tarball from the repo and provide limited access to *those* files to
>>   distros and mirrors to give them time to sync and build their binaries
>>   before making them available to the public. I mirror Ubuntu and Fedora.
>>   The deal is that I get the rpms and debs two days before the public does.
>>   This is so that every official mirror on the planet is ready to
>>   simultaneously publish the release *all*at*the*same*time*.
>>
>> This is a very excellent way of working. You have no idea how much chaos
>> thousands of eager beaver users cause pounding away at my inbox if I don't
>> have the latest Ubuntu for them the day it is released because sharks bit
>>   the undersea cable to London and the inbound bandwidth slows to a crawl.
>>   I'm not making this up - stuff like this happens.
>>
>> Gentoo erred in publishing ebuilds for tarballs that were not generally
>> available yet.
>>
>
> no, the user erred in stupid unmasking.

The user used the provided unmask file 
(Documentation/package.unmask/kde-4.4).