CentOS - Jan 2008 - Use CentOSplus to carry latest GUI packages

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?

-Ross

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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/

I'll never say never, but I think changing Gnome or KDE is just TOO much 
to still call it CentOS.

WRT Xen ... I'll leave that to Karanbir to discuss.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes

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Ross S. W. Walker wrote on Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:17:51 -0500:
> 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?
see recent postings to centos-virt.

Kai

-- 
Kai Sch?tzl, Berlin, Germany
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