On Mon, 2011-08-29 at 15:03 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
On 08/25/2011 05:28 PM, Nils Philippsen wrote:
>
> You're probably referring to the updates 2.2->2.4 in '07 and 2.4->2.6
in
> '08 but please keep in mind that we're stuck with 2.6.x as the stable
> branch since then, so there's no reason to be gloomy about the Fedora
> side just yet.
I remember how we tracked the 2.3-2.4 development in Rawhide, which
allowed me at the time to write articles (previews, tutorials) based on
our official packages and, of course, allowed the entire community to
contribute with testing and feedback.
We didn't track development at that time, these were release candidates
of 2.4, see the RPM changelog:
...
* Wed Oct 24 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.4.0-1
...
* Fri Sep 07 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.4.0-0.rc3.2
...
* Fri Sep 07 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.4.0-0.rc3.1
...
* Fri Sep 07 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.4.0-0.rc2.2
...
* Tue Sep 04 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.4.0-0.rc2.1
...
* Thu Aug 16 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.4.0-0.rc1.1
...
* Fri Jul 13 2007 Nils Philippsen <nphilipp(a)redhat.com> - 2:2.2.17-1
...
These versions already used the same file names as proper 2.4.x did,
right now I know that much of this _will_ change when 2.8 is released,
which incidentally impacts packaging the most (rather than normal code
changes).
> While we mightn't have had an explicit update policy for
Fedora in the
> time, these packages only went in after thorough testing on top of that
> upstream managed to keep things as backwards-compatible as could be
> expected -- the built-in scheme interpreter became a bit more strict in
> 2.6, which was a documented break with 2.4 which could easily be fixed
> by fixing affected 3rd party scripts.
Testing is the "magic" word, we want to test it.
Foremost, I want to have packages tested that actually have a more than
even chance of ending up in the stable release. Right now I don't feel
as confident about getting 2.8 in time for F-17 as I felt about 2.4 for
F-8. If you look at the development schedule on
http://tasktaste.com/projects/Enselic/gimp-2-8 you'll notice some fairly
sizable tasks left which account for 15-18 workdays of people who'll
likely do this in their spare time, which is projected right now for
about 81 realtime days from now. I haven't seen much activity on the
listed topics though in the last time (not critiquing upstream devs
here, I'm a bit surprised to see only 2 real tasks left on that
schedule), so this might slip even a bit more. "It's ready when it's
ready" and all that. Rest assured that I'll push packages when we get to
a point where inclusion is probable.
> Considering that upstream to a large part isn't interested
in working on
> 2.6 anymore -- the last commit by a core developer to this branch was in
> February this year -- I don't expect to see another 2.6 bugfix release.
> As well, installing both stable versions side-by-side isn't an option as
> you can't install them into the same prefix: the libraries have the same
> SONAME, the new ones are expected to be ABI compatible. Therefore I
> don't see a real alternative to rebasing to 2.8 in stable Fedora
> releases when it finally is available, after thoroughly testing it of
> course (which I already do to a certain extent, I can e.g. confirm that
> the ufraw gimp plugin built with 2.6 works with a private installation
> of current git master).
In the meantime I feel there is some duplicate effort wasted here: the
maintainer (Nils) is doing his own testing in private, another
contributor (Luya) is struggling (and hitting walls) with building an
external repo, people don't know what and from where to use.
I'll think about making "gimp-beta" packages and putting them on
fedorapeople, but their relevance for testing in Fedora will be rather
limited as they have to be installed into a different prefix
(e.g. /opt), so all 3rd party stuff won't work without user intervention
(i.e. symlinks into /usr/...).
Nils
--
Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase
Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils(a)redhat.com nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011