[ltp] Mandrake vs Redhat

[Robert B. Lowrie]

On Thursday 03 January 2002 09:10 am, you wrote:
> Actually Red Hat doesn't provide "official" RPMs for KDE.

Well, they have shipped KDE since Redhat 6.0.  But maybe "official" is a 
relative term.  See below.

> Some of their employees and users do provide RPMs, which Red Hat then 
> includes in their
> distro, but no payed RH employee has the job of building KDE packages or
> maintaining them. If you go to the KDE web site's downloads section there
> is a rather lengthy discussion of this issue.

Which I believe can be interpreted much differently than you have  (if you're 
referring to http://www.kde.org/packagepolicy.html).  For example, Redhat 7.2 
ships with KDE 2.2.  But KDE 2.2.2 is the latest version, I believe released 
after Redhat 7.2 shipped.  It is true that Redhat doesn't necessarily provide 
KDE updates for an already released distro and apparently this bothers the 
KDE developers quite a bit.  But, unless there is a serious bug or security 
problem, they generally don't do this for ANY package, be it KDE or Gnome or 
whatever.  I think this is a reasonable policy.

If you want to run the latest release of a particular package, that may or 
may not have been tested with the rest of your system, then Redhat probably 
isn't for you.

> It appears that RH has
> decided not to put any resources at all into releases for KDE. Predictably
> what people are getting is not fully integrated and not always as up to
> date as what you get with other distros like ML where KDE is integrated and
> tested from the ground up with each release.

Maybe you have some inside information that I don't.   However, the 'bleeding 
edge' Redhat is called `rawhide', which currently can be downloaded with KDE 
3.0.0 (again, see http://www.distrowatch.com/).  I suspect that rawhide will 
be tested/updated for quite some time before an official distro is made (7.3 
or 8.0).  At least this is how pre-Redhat 7.2 progressed.  Certainly the KDE 
rpms aren't added as an afterthought or at the last minute.

Whether Redhat can get their employees to work for free, I don't know.

I should say I'm not Redhat's biggest fan, either.  I think the 'gcc 2.96' 
debacle was a big mistake and I do wish they offered more _development_ 
support/money behind KDE.  They also were late in the game in even adding KDE 
as an option, presumably under competitive pressure from Mandrake, but this 
is old news.

One thing I am sure of:  I'm much more productive using Redhat/KDE than using 
any M$ platform, and I'm confident that I'd be the same using Mandrake.

-Rob

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