Why distributions shouldn’t ship development versions

At Desktop Summit Lubos asked me what openSUSE has to do that I will switch back to SUSE. I replied that I am satisfied with Kubuntu and so I don’t see any need to switch the distribution. So what has changed since July?

Kubuntu will ship the Plasma Netbook Shell in their next release. Of course the Netbook Shell is under heavy development and will be shipped in KDE 4.4 for the first time. Given the current release plan we can consider the current state as pre-alpha. But that seems not to be any problem for Kubuntu – they even are able to support it for 18 months as it is in the main repository. They are even able to ship a recent SVN revison: the current package is svn rev 1016996. So quite decent and no problem at all, isn’t it? Well no, KDE 4.3 got branched way before and since then trunk is KDE 4.4 and code in trunk may depend on trunk. But if there were a dependency it would break at compile time, wouldn’t it?

But couldn’t there be runtime dependencies? No way, that’s totally impossible. It’s a plasma netbook shell, not a KDE workspace netbook shell! So it’s totally impossible that KWin added changes to improve the netbook shell. So we have in the netbook shell a commit with this commit message:

Activate present windows by setting a property instead of faking keys. Requires kwin svn rev 988110

Of course a distribution checks all the svn log entries and knows about such issues. So they will probably use the old code, which was just a placeholder to be replaced as soon as trunk becomes 4.4 as happened. So I downloaded the source package and woops it contains my commit. Hmm so there is still the possibility that KWin was patched. That would be really bad as present windows received lots of changes at the beginning of 4.4 release cycle. Which is great but shouldn’t be shipped in a distribution before it has been tested probably. So I thought, let’s check the patches in bazaar. Well there is no such patch to KWin. So the applet is basically broken in the Kubuntu edition. Kubuntu will not only ship and advertise a development snapshot, they will be shipping broken software. (which btw is not the first time that Kubuntu ships development snapshot unsuited for usage – just remember the NetworkManager Plasmoid).

Update: Kubuntu assured that the Plasma Netbook Shell will only be published as a tech preview and that it will communicated as that. This makes of course the points mentioned above invalid.

While browsing the patches in bazaar I found a different patch which really upset me. It is a patch which was discussed on kcd last week and was rejected by all workspace developers who replied to that patch. So a patch which is not good enough for KDE is good enough for Kubuntu. I though Kubuntu wants to be the best KDE distribution. Sorry, that isn’t. I am disappointed and I think it is a bad sign if decisions by the upstream project are ignored (the change to package kdebase-workspace was commit after the discussion started on kcd). I objected to the patch for technical reasons and there was agreement to improve the notification instead of stepping back to present nag dialogs.

For quite some time I am disappointed by the developments of Kubuntu. With 4.3 packages the translations broke again (as every half year) and that is just the worst which could happen to user experience. Because of that problem I stopped to recommend Kubuntu to my friends. But now I see a development in Karmic which I do not want to use myself. There is a broken development snapshot of the netbook shell, an alpha release of k3b is shipped, which is not even shipped by Fedora, because it “isn’t quite ready, and not recommended for use by upstream” and Karmic will ship an additional notification system, which doesn’t support actions, to “test” how KDE users will get along with it. I don’t have any problems with Canonical deciding to develop and ship a different notification system but as soon as it degrades the KDE workspace it has to stop. By shipping that patch there is a degeneration of the user experience as a dialog is shown instead of a notification. If you doubt that the change was done just because of the Ayatana notifications please read this mail. I do not want to know how many additional changes there are breaking user experience.

Update: Scott stated in the comment section that the patch is controversial in the Kubuntu community and it has not yet been decided if the patch will be shipped.

So to me this is the end. It’s time to part from Kubuntu after four years of usage as I cannot say any more that it is a good KDE distribution and satisfies my needs. I won’t update to Karmic and instead will install a different distribution. I do not yet know which one I will choose, maybe I return to openSUSE, maybe I will use Debian testing/unstable or switch to Gentoo. Probably Debian will win as I do not want to learn a different packaging system.