On Tuesday 26 January 2010 00:06:50 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. >
Yes, very true. $PORTDIR/profiles/package.mask does usually clearly say stuff like masking next kde version in preparation for release on <date> or words to that effect -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
