There is a lot of pressure being built up on why packaging KDE is getting so delayed. According to official sources it should have become available in the beginning of march, but now being the beginning of April, no signs yet.
There is a good news as well as some bad news. Good news is that the semi-official repository qt-kde will see the 4.6.1 by Saturday, we may expect one or two days of delay there, but it will make it there pretty soon.
Bad news is that it may get further delayed to land on one of the official repositories. According to a mail in the Debian mailing list, official archives will see 4.6.2 (which is scheduled at April 5th by the KDE upstream) or later. Users of the testing repository may have to wait sometime more.
According to the package maintainers, the KDE SC is huge, and each package has to be verified that it meets Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Given the complexity of the project, it is no more technically as easy as it was in 2.x series. Once the major release is packaged, updating it to point releases is easier. So, even when users have to wait a little longer for 4.6.1 (the major version), they will notice that updates to point releases (4.6.x) are quicker.
All who are impatient should understand that all the work that goes into Debian is voluntary, people do it for fun on their free time, and do not want to be pressured. In an IRC chat with the package maintainers, I learned that there are much more packages they wish to get packaged into the repositories, and welcome any assistance. But the assistance is expected from an experienced person, and not a complete novice. If no one comes forward, those packages may not be included in Debian at all. For example, one maintainer wished he had semantik - a mind mapping tool - in the repository. I checked and found that it is an KDE extragear package which is currently missing in the repository.
I know that KDE 4.7 is going to be released in July (according to official sources). Again Debian will face the same delay in getting 4.7 in for the same reasons. But, I decided to learn some basics and get prepared from now itself so that I can be of some help at that time.
A good starting point would be the New Maintainer's Guide for anyone willing to join forces.
There is a good news as well as some bad news. Good news is that the semi-official repository qt-kde will see the 4.6.1 by Saturday, we may expect one or two days of delay there, but it will make it there pretty soon.
Bad news is that it may get further delayed to land on one of the official repositories. According to a mail in the Debian mailing list, official archives will see 4.6.2 (which is scheduled at April 5th by the KDE upstream) or later. Users of the testing repository may have to wait sometime more.
According to the package maintainers, the KDE SC is huge, and each package has to be verified that it meets Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Given the complexity of the project, it is no more technically as easy as it was in 2.x series. Once the major release is packaged, updating it to point releases is easier. So, even when users have to wait a little longer for 4.6.1 (the major version), they will notice that updates to point releases (4.6.x) are quicker.
All who are impatient should understand that all the work that goes into Debian is voluntary, people do it for fun on their free time, and do not want to be pressured. In an IRC chat with the package maintainers, I learned that there are much more packages they wish to get packaged into the repositories, and welcome any assistance. But the assistance is expected from an experienced person, and not a complete novice. If no one comes forward, those packages may not be included in Debian at all. For example, one maintainer wished he had semantik - a mind mapping tool - in the repository. I checked and found that it is an KDE extragear package which is currently missing in the repository.
I know that KDE 4.7 is going to be released in July (according to official sources). Again Debian will face the same delay in getting 4.7 in for the same reasons. But, I decided to learn some basics and get prepared from now itself so that I can be of some help at that time.
A good starting point would be the New Maintainer's Guide for anyone willing to join forces.
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