MEPIS Community Forum

I was under the impression that some here with "inside access" were keeping him apprised of the showstopping bugs, namely the GRUB thing and the no-boot thing.

Are you saying that we should be emailing him direct regarding those issues?

Yes, provided you can write a concise bug report on a single issue that will help him.

See this thread for a copy of the bug report I sent him. Short, to the point. I didn't need to describe my hardware because I knew it had nothing to do with hardware drivers. From that report he wrote back to say he knew what went wrong, and he'd be starting on a new build as soon as he could clear some time.
http://mepislovers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=28679

I can't say he'll write back to everyone who sends in a bug report. I think the answer hit him as soon as he read my email, and he wanted Jerry to post the "oh crap" message as a reply to short-circuit a lot of further wasted time.

But: anyone can and should send in a bug report if s/he has observed a bug and has some kind of handle on what may be going wrong.

Bug reports should go to devatmepisdotorg --I don't want to put it in standard email address form to guard against spambots, but you can translate the run-on English into the right form.

What Warren does not need is a long rambling account of various problems you and I and cousin Jed are having. . . that's what we have these Beta forum threads for! I just distilled the reported problem for him after I realized, from the forum, that it wasn't only my install alone that somehow went wrong. So take a look at that link given above for one possible type of Bug Report that will be helpful.

Again, I stress, don't everybody just flood Warren with all kinds of complaints and problems. The man can't get any work done if he's reading pages of email! In some distros, you can't even send the developers a bug report unless you're signed up as a alpha/beta tester who has some competence. Warren hasn't got Mepis set up that way --he wants the forum to be a self-sifting process to determine what the problems are. But you don't have to have "special clearance" to write if you're pretty sure you can boil it down to what he needs to know.

All that is good, though I will point out that Warren specifically asked in his announcement of the alpha that bug reports be posted on MepisLovers.

Okay, that's what I thought. Based on your linked page, "The man can't get any work done if he's reading pages of email," I'll refrain from reporting these bugs. I'm sure he already knows about them. I've written to him occasionally in the past, and he has usually responded with either a solution or an explanation.

So we wait....

Should be good enough. He does check.

The past two KDE releases, 4.4 and 4.5, have had at least 75% defect fixes, and the majority of the remaining changes have been improvements to previously existing features, and a relatively small percentage of the changes have been completely new features.

That said, we are already at KDE SC 4.5.3, so any new changes that were introduced in KDE 4.5 have had three iterations to be fixed. If we do not have a release by December, then even KDE SC 4.5.4 will be out. That would be four incremental monthly updates since KDE SC 4.4.5.

On one hand, KDE SC 4.4.5 is reasonably solid. On the other hand, I do know of at least one application, the KDE-centric Rekonq browser, that does not work correctly in KDE SC 4.4.5, but it does work correctly in all of the KDE SC 4.5 releases.

Considering that Kubuntu 10.10 has had KDE SC 4.5.1 out for over a month now, Fedora 14 has KDE SC 4.5.2 released, and PCLinuxOS has been migrating through all of the 4.5 releases - with success, I suggest that unless building a KDE branch takes way too many resources, I think it would be well worth the time, not only for the feature set, but for what I have observed as increasing stability. KDE 4 is now quite mature with KDE SC 4.5, and the 4.5.3 release is quite solid.

I hope that these things are taken into serious consideration when the amount of work versus the expected benefits are weighed.

Brian, I suggest you send your comment to Warren directly.

(sigh) Too bad Mr. Woodford doesn't have time to read and reply to forum threads like this one.

By the time Mepis 11 releases, in all probability KDE SC 4.5 will more-or-less have already been replaced by KDE SC 4.6 anyway i.e. the first Beta of 4.6 is already due sometime this week.
Additionally, most of the distro's seem to be generally skipping 4.5 in their stable offerings (although 4.5 has some definite improvements - an integrated systemsettings, better systray icons and numerous bugfixes).
Most distro's offer a path to 4.5 (Gentoo, Fedora, Suse etc), but their stable offerings will go from 4.4.5 > 4.6 . Example, Gentoo won't ship 4.5 but it's available in unstable meantime. Suse same, available from Factory, but stable is 4.4.5.
Also kdepim team this week abandoned (skipped) all work on 4.5 (i.e. the it's dead! announcement ) for a 100% effort to ship kdepim for 4.6.

I'd say Warren is right to deliver what Debian supplies qua KDE (4.4.5) and not overly prioritize it over the more pressing matters of getting M11 booting up on most boxes plus integrating the new kernel.
He's already right up-to-date on many, many core packages under M11 such as OpenOffice/Samba/Bash/Vim/Alsa/Module-init-tools/Hal and Udev.
His track record further shows that he'll (most probably) take a somewhat more current KDE from upstream, whenever he deems it to be appropriate (i.e. probably further down the line).
But (to now) juggle simultaneously building up a new release with a plethora of new core packages while also tracking current KDE trunk releases (~30 KDE upgrades daily alone) might be asking a bit much.

He's already ahead of most other Distro's in his current choice of kernel (2.6.36) and I would presume that he would, in due time, take what he deems the most suitable version of KDE (from upstream).
- only I'd expect that transition to be at a much later point in Beta/RC testing ...when most initial bugs have been ironed out. These seem much more important right now.
For me, Warren still seems to have the midas touch, in that, whatever combination he eventually releases always seems to be rock-solid and rarely (if ever) fails me.
To conclude, I'd guess that M11 final would indeed eventually transition to a more up-to-date KDE SC release ...but for now it's probably premature to request it aka more pressing matters.

I'm disappointed that KDE 4.5.x isn't going to be included in Debian Squeeze, but that's okay because I'm using GNOME over there, anyway. But the bigger issue for me was that it meant that KDE 4.5.x probably wouldn't be included in Mepis 11.

But what Davo's saying is right. Warren's never gonna be able to put out a Mepis version that has the latest of everything; he does, however, have a great track record of putting out solid releases. I'm pretty sure Mepis 11 will be very good even with 4.4.x.

Having said all that, even though Mepis will certainly continue to be my primary distro, I'm kinda glad I have some other ones installed so that I can use 4.5.x when I want to.