Thinking about switching my laptop to Factory, and while this potentially screws up my package building (certainly means no more usr local bin packages for 10.0) I've been getting really frustrated with using 10.0 with the supplementary GNOME packages. My big problem is bug #152399. At the moment whenever I want to upgrade, I'm having to let Smart remove evolution (and any packages that depend on it) and then reinstall all of them (and at that point let Smart downgrade evolution-data-server and gnome-panel).

So, I've got the ISOs for 10.1 Beta5 downloaded, and I'm planning to use them as the starting point for my Factory transition if I like the response to this mail on the Factory list.

Thing is that at the moment, Factory isn't what I'd envisioned it being back in September. My vision back then was to have two permanent trees within the OpenSUSE project (which would equate to what are currently named Stable and Factory), with a third (Beta) being created a fork from Factory when the beta program for each release started. It would then become the Stable tree at release. Thing is that, although at the moment there are apparently three trees in play: Stable, Factory and Current (10.1 Beta 5), the Current tree (ie what I would expect to be the Beta tree) is basically a stripped down version of Factory made into ISOs.

I think that Factory should be a no-holds-barred bleeding edge tree. If it's not likely to blow a hole in your CPU, order pizza on your credit card or sleep with your daughter, then it's too safe for Factory! It's quite simply not that though, and that's probably because it's the same as the Beta tree. There has to be some degree of stability in Beta^[1] because of the intention of it being used to iron out bugs for the next stable release, but Factory should be for moving forward. Example: Factory should have GNOME 2.13.x in. It should currently be carrying the first release candidate of 2.14, but it's not, it still has 2.12. This not only means that it's not fulfilling what I think its remit should be, but it also means that GNOME 2.13/2.14 is not getting the testing it could be getting from the OpenSUSE community.

On the future of my packages, once we have the Build Service available, that issue is done I suppose, and that's likely to be before 10.2. Also, this is around the time in the beta process that I normally switch to the incoming version anyway.

In other news, a whole bunch of OpenSUSE types are at FOSDEM - have a great time guys!

^[1]Reckless new package manager not withstanding