On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 22:18 -0600, Abraham Al-Saleh wrote:
> I'd say wait until it's stable, or at
> least not hard masked, they'll probably have a few things worked out
> by then.
Here's how it works:
Gnome (and GTK, Freedesktop.org underneath it, and a bunch of other
things) are running on time based release cycle, with a release every 6
months. The most recent was 15 September.
The gentoo Gnome developers **are a part of the Gnome project and many
are Gnome developers themselves**. This means that you *really* don't
need to tell them that gnome 2.x (x even) is out - they were a part of
getting it there, yo!
It generally takes about a month from that point to shake out all the
glitches in terms of getting all the ebuilds squared away so that the
new version of Gnome will integrate with the rest of your Gentoo system.
[if it doesn't then what's the point of installing it?]
Meanwhile, the Gnome people upstream are madly fixing bugs and in
particular updating translations. Typically there is a 2.x.1 release
about a month after the 6 month time based 2.x.0 release. And then,
about a month after that, is a final wrap up 2.x.2 release.
YOU WANT THE 2.x.2 VERSION. BECAUSE THAT'S THE ONE WITH ALL THE BUGS
WORKED OUT. If (and only if) you want to help bug test Gnome 2.x on
Gentoo would I recommend upgrading to it before Gnome 2.x.1 or 2.x.2 is
available from upstream. And remember - ebuilds for such a large number
of interdependent packages do take a little bit of time to get right.
In practice, this all means that you can expect Gnome 2.8.2 to be
stable on Gentoo at about 3 months out of phase with the upstream Gnome
release. As a data point, 3 or so months of 2.6.0 coming out is about
when we got 2.6.2 marked stable in Portage. 2.4.2 was similar.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that you can expect distributions to
release on a 6 month time based release schedule some number between 1
and 3 months later than the major upstream project release schedule.
Fedora, Gentoo, and Debian are already (completely coincidentally)
converging on a practice along these lines.
[.The Ubuntu team has just raised the bar a bit in terms of getting it
out the door quickly, but they too aren't having their gold plated 6
month time based release of the distro until a month or two after their
public x.0 launch (which was also 15 Sep). Before you whine about that,
remember that Canonical *pays* a lot of the Gnome developers to ensure
Gnome is ready to go on Ubuntu. Gentoo people aren't generally employed
to make Gnome work on Gentoo, so have patience]
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.7/ if you would like to see the (just
finished) upstream schedule for 2.8
AfC
Sydney
--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS
Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
