10.2 release announcement...

K

kpa

Code: 
[LIST]
[*]GNOME has been updated to version 3.14.2.


[*]KDE has been updated to version 4.14.3.
[/LIST]

I strongly feel that these items shouldn't be in the release notes announcement, at least not mentioned as "highlights". Why? First of all they are not part of the OS proper but are third party software in the ports(7). Secondly, putting them high up in the release notes announcement among the first items gives the impression that FreeBSD is in the business of competing with other open source OSes that are geared for easy graphical desktop user experience. There are dozens of other ports that could have been mentioned in highlights with very good reasons, why choose only Gnome and KDE? Lastly, the version numbers mentioned are just arbitrary and the ports just happened to be at those versions at the time of the release. The release announcement gives the false impression that someone has decided that those particular versions are now the official Gnome and KDE versions in FreeBSD 10.2 which is not true at all.
 
I was also surprised to read those items in the release announcement. I'm happy that attention is being paid to desktop usage, but agree it's confusing to mention them this way like they are part of the OS. I did notice that the default package repository was changed to the quarterly branch, so the versions have more of a connection to the release.

The way they are listed in the release notes makes more sense.
 
I have to say this confused me as well--not just because those desktop environments aren't tied to any FreeBSD version, but also because GNOME was upgraded to 3.16.3 in the ports tree nine days before 10.2 was released. If I may be forgiven for saying so, that's a rather significant oversight from a marketing standpoint...
 
getopt said:
Of course it does make sense to have it on certain installation media. But this is not the point of discussion here.
Click to expand...

I'm just pointing out that why those particular ports and those particular versions were mentioned may be due to it being packaged with the install media.

I was going to say that GNOME/KDE have been part of release announcements before but looking at several of the recent ones I had to go back to the 8.4-RELEASE announcement and 9.0-RELEASE announcement to see when it was last mentioned. I'm sure that historical reasons are part of this. If anything the biggest surprise I would say is the quarterly branch isn't mentioned until the bottom of the release notes rather than being in the announcement. Using quarterly branches for packages aligns nicely to using binary updates for security patches in the base system.
 
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