[CentOS-devel] Re: Use CentOSplus to carry latest GUI packages

Fri Jan 11 18:17:48 UTC 2008
Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu>

Johnny Hughes wrote:

> Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
>> I don't know if this has been talked about much in the past, but I was
>> wondering if CentOSplus could be used to carry the latest stable versions
>> of the GUI applications KDE/Gnome. These apps often lag behind quite a
>> bit even on the selected stable branch upstream has chosen.
>> 
>> For example, would it decrease stability to update KDE from 3.5.4 to
>> 3.5.8? I think it would add to stability as long as you stay within that
>> 3.5 branch, but upstream thinks otherwise and tries to re-invent the
>> wheel by backporting 3.5.5-3.5.8 fixes into 3.5.4 which often don't work
>> completely and have the potential of creating new bugs themselves.
>> 
>> Another thing, Xen, the Xen package says it's 3.0.3, but looking at the
>> SRPM it turns out it's the Xen 3.1 kernel with the Xen 3.0.3 'xm' and
>> 'xend' dom0 utilities. In my book that's Xen 3.1, why not just fix the
>> parts of the 3.1 utilities that broke between releases?
>> 
>> Anyways Xen may not be a good candidate as others may have environmental
>> dependencies on the upstream version, but upgrading to the latest minor
>> version within a branch for a given application shouldn't break
>> environmental dependencies, ie provide Xen 3.1.4 if it contains the xm
>> and xend fixes that upstream was looking for.
>> 
>> What is the consenus on this?
>> 
> 
> WRT the major desktops ... I am not sure that I would want to do that.
> 
> There are so many things that change that I would think it would be
> easier to just use fedora.
> 
> There is a kde-redhat project for KDE that will do that for you:
> http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

That said, I'd be open to help integrating some or all of anything at
kde-redhat (or epel pkgs I'm involved with) into centos(plus) or whatever. 
I'd likely need some help/hand-holding, but otherwise sounds useful.

-- Rex