[rant] The need for pre-releases, and the idiocy

This is pure and simple rant.. yeah because I’m really tired of this whole situation, and ashamed at the same time, and I’m almost tempted to move to GNOME after this. And everybody who knows me would understand how much pissed off I have to be to say that.

I already wrote about the debacle of another distribution, that I left otherwise unnamed, in the pre-release of KDE 3.5.4. Well at this point I’m going to say that the one I was referring to was SUSE, as simple as it was to understand.

But now, I’m informed that also Debian, the good, free Debian, released KDE 3.5.4 pre-release on their unstable users … and not only, also Ubuntu did!

I’m not going to look up how many distributions did actually release the pre-release snapshots, but this is getting pretty stupid. First of all, there’s already one problem currently on 3.5.4, due to the merge of Coolo’s HAL branch, that make eject work only when HAL is ran as root.. which is not the case neither for ArchLinux (the ones reporting the problem) and Gentoo. I didn’t hit this before, because unieject took care of unmounting the devices with pumount for me.. Leio also told me a similar problem is present in current GNOME beta, and it’s fixed by unieject too. I love when I fix problems that weren’t existing before 😉 (on a serious note, I’m proud of unieject now, it is proving a good thing to me at least).

Returning on my rant, I had to undergo a whole KDE release done after official press release because of Dan being unavailable, and without anyone to fetch the prerelease snapshots for me. I had to ask Caleb please to add me to the list of accepted SSH keys to be able to get into ktown and get the tarballs, I let the developers get the tarballs and told them to strictly NOT distribute them, I was scolded by Carsten Lorche, for even telling the other devs about those; Caleb had to ask KDE sysadmins to get me subscribed to kde-packager secret list, and for what? To get some tarballs that three distributions already released to public!

Now, I feel really ashamed to be a KDE user, developer, packager. I’m feeling teased, I’m feeling fooled around. Why is there so much secrecy into pre-releases, the whole long procedure to get something if anybody can release it out of schedule?!

Now I’m wondering, if instead of Debian, Ubuntu and SUSE there was a new distribution, small, with limited users. What would have happened then? No more pre-release access? No more kde-packager? At least a scolding?

So this is my rant, on a night I’m already of enough of a bad mood by myself, I’m melting, and I’m f*cking pissed off by this treatment.

They either are pre-releases or they aren’t! If they are just “try and test” releases, release them as 3.5.3.90 and so on, but don’t start the crap of pre-releases, SSH access to the tarballs, secret mailing lists if anyone can release them on their own!