[Xastir] Stable release timing?

[Rick Green]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, KC7ZRU wrote:

> Personally, and yes - I've a bit of 'tude here - I say we release on OUR 
> schedule. If some distro or another - no matter how popular - gets something 
> older due to their policies, that's not an Xastir problem.
Yeah, and I could easily get worked up over top-posting and full-quoting, 
but I'd rather not ;-)
   I have read many frustrated posts on the xastir and aprssig lists, from 
people who actually want to run xastir, but they find the initial step 
just too big to climb.  Most of them are not even Linux users, much less 
programmers, so the whole process of installing libraries first, then 
compiling from source, is totally foreign to them.  The distributions do a 
great job of making Linux accessable to newbies.
   Yes, the pathway by which packages like xastir get included into 
distributions is convoluted and mysterious.  And as Murphy might have 
predicted, they seem to take random snapshots of the code at the most 
inopportune moments.  I think that bug of opening into a tiny window 
actually existed for only a few days in CVS, but here it is the first 
impression that a newbie gets of xastir, and it will continue to be for 
a whole year.
   There has been discussion on the list of late towards declaration of a 
newer 'stable' release, so with that in mind, I thought I might be able to 
help by tracing the pathway to at least one distribution, and see if I 
could contribute something by shortening that path with some hand-holding, 
or even learning how to build .deb packages myself.  I'm not deprecating 
the work of the developers, I'm just trying to get their best work into as 
many appreciative hands as quickly as possible.

-- 
Rick Green

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
                                   -Benjamin Franklin