Comment by jprzybyl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jprzybyl | Hacker News Reader

I had a sour taste in my mouth when I read this, but I can sort of see it. It reminds me of Ubuntu's release pattern - 3 unstable releases then 1 stable release alternating. The only difference is that the major number changes for the first unstable release. (Makes sense. The point-oh release is unstable, the stable release has a big number on the end.)

I think the controversy is that, when I read this, I get the impression that GNOME devs either don't believe that backwards compatibility is possible in the long run, or that it's at least unpractical. I don't really get that impression given QT's backwards compatibility, MFC, etc, but if they really believe it, then faking it is unproductive, and just making a more distro-like release plan is reasonable.

I really can't get the distro comparison out of my head - it's like they tried a single release that lasted forever, and that didn't work, so they tried a rolling release, and that didn't work, so now they're going with unstable releases with LTS releases every 2 years.

I feel like they could have saved themselves an immense amount of pain in the comments if they'd just called the alpha releases ("4.0", "4.2", "4.4") like the are; they quack like a duck. Why is 4.0-alpha.1, 4.0-alpha.2, etc., so hard?

The average developer does not think "oh, 4.2; that's an alpha release", they think it's two iterations on 4.0.

This is a completely valid viewpoint, and one we can discuss tomorrow at the hackfest.

Thanks for sharing.

This is important. In a release scheme where a new version is out regularly, you want to be able to easily point to specific, stable, old version by just saying "this has been available since GTK 27" instead of having to know that at the 27 major number, the stable version is 13, so you need that specific knowledge to be able to say "this has been available since GTK 27.13". The RC, alpha, beta releases are just steps towards the stable release, which is the only version that remains.

I was very much pushing for a single version number, but there was some hesitation to it. I'll try again when we discuss it next.

More and more when i see a Gnome dev write about empowering "upstream" i replace it with empowering Gnome. They are hung up on user experience so much that they want one, canonical (heh), Linux distro that they get to define. Fedora, suse, Debian, Arch, it will be all the same with a different sticker on top.

And they have the backing of RH in this, by way of Fedora and Freedesktop.

Lets not forget that Freedesktop was actually founded by Havoc Pennington while working at RH on desktop matters. Frankly Freedesktop do not exist to actually foster interoperability. it exists to whitewash RH decisions.

For me, Linux is better when there is a distinction between kernel, user space (and its various parts), X, and the DE/WM.

The direction things are going right now means tightening integration by using systemd as the glue, and Gnome as honey. All to lure distros in and get them stuck like flies on, well, flypaper.

> Lets not forget that Freedesktop was actually founded by Havoc Pennington while working at RH on desktop matters. Frankly Freedesktop do not exist to actually foster interoperability. it exists to whitewash RH decisions.

This is ludicrous to anyone who has worked at Red Hat at some point in their career. Red Hat internally is almost a perfect mirror of the community at large. There are thousands of differentiating viewpoints on pretty much any topic related to Free Software (including if we should call it Free Software).

The group of people working on desktop at RH are quite small, it's not the cabal you seem to imply.

> All to lure distros in and get them stuck like flies on, well, flypaper.

We're trying to build a modern operating system where the components are part of a whole. I'm sorry you feel that is some sort of trap. That is not the intention, in any way.

I see a whole forming, but i see no parts.

Qt's backward compat story is great and not so great. It's BC and sometimes SC but the fact is they keep breaking behavior even in patch releases. If you develop with Qt for a long time, you realize that BC is simply not good enough and you start static linking (a process they have made quite hard with Qt5).

I've noticed that some projects don't link statically anymore with Qt 5.6 but others do. I believe the CMake scripts are insufficient while qmake projects works most of the time but also not always. I haven't figured it out. If you have links with more info, I'd be curious. Also, I take it it's not possible to configure a Qt5 build to produce .so and .a files, or am I wrong?

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