Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@×××××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: KDE 4.3.95 tarballs?
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:21:15
Message-Id: hjl8vi$42n$2@ger.gmane.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: KDE 4.3.95 tarballs? by Volker Armin Hemmann
1 On 01/26/2010 12:40 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
2 > On Montag 25 Januar 2010, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
3 >> On 01/26/2010 12:06 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
4 >>> On Montag 25 Januar 2010, Alan McKinnon wrote:
5 >>>> On Monday 25 January 2010 23:11:18 Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
6 >>>>>> Today it is finally released. I don't know why it took so long. :)
7 >>>>>
8 >>>>> It's a bit sad though that an open source project keeps secrets... I
9 >>>>> found out that the tarballs were available for days now but only for
10 >>>>> maintainers of KDE packages of various distros. For example Arch Linux
11 >>>>> had RC2 binaries available in its [kde-unstable] repo since Jan 21, but
12 >>>>> no one would give a link to the tarballs used to build the sources
13 >>>>> because they are "secret".
14 >>>>>
15 >>>>> Am I the only one to find this frustrating (to say the least)?
16 >>>>
17 >>>> There's nothing secret here. Nothing to see, move along folks.
18 >>>>
19 >>>> The code is always available in svn, if you wanted it that bad you could
20 >>>> have checked it out. It's common release engineering practice to build
21 >>>> a tarball from the repo and provide limited access to *those* files to
22 >>>> distros and mirrors to give them time to sync and build their binaries
23 >>>> before making them available to the public. I mirror Ubuntu and Fedora.
24 >>>> The deal is that I get the rpms and debs two days before the public
25 >>>> does. This is so that every official mirror on the planet is ready to
26 >>>> simultaneously publish the release *all*at*the*same*time*.
27 >>>>
28 >>>> This is a very excellent way of working. You have no idea how much chaos
29 >>>> thousands of eager beaver users cause pounding away at my inbox if I
30 >>>> don't have the latest Ubuntu for them the day it is released because
31 >>>> sharks bit the undersea cable to London and the inbound bandwidth slows
32 >>>> to a crawl. I'm not making this up - stuff like this happens.
33 >>>>
34 >>>> Gentoo erred in publishing ebuilds for tarballs that were not generally
35 >>>> available yet.
36 >>>
37 >>> no, the user erred in stupid unmasking.
38 >>
39 >> The user used the provided unmask file
40 >> (Documentation/package.unmask/kde-4.4).
41 >>
42 >
43 > before release.
44 >
45 > Gentoo has a proud tradition of providing the ebuilds before the software is
46 > released so as soon as the tarballs hit the mirrors you can start compiling.
47 >
48 > If you unmask earlier and get errors you are the only person to blame.
49
50 And besides, I unmasked for KDE 4.3.90 (RC1) which was released, not
51 4.3.95. But the provided unmask doesn't distinguish between them; it
52 only specifies the :4.4 slot, not -4.3.90 version numbers.
53
54 Perhaps you should first check that you know what you're talking about.