Re: [gentoo-user] Re: KDE 4.3.95 tarballs?

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

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.