On 06/01/2012 03:16 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Andrew Z wrote:
>
>>   just curious if you know the time-frame for 4.10 hitting the SL in
>> packaged form :) ?
>
> Probably no time soon, since it apparently requires newer versions of
> Gtk+, Glib etc than exist in SL 6.
>
> http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/building
>    Xfce 4.10 requires Gtk+ 2.20 and Glib 2.24
>
> SL6 has 2.18 and 2.22.

This sort of thing is why you exchange "cutting edge" for stability. 
Its the same issue with moving KDE ahead to > 4.3: a lot of the core 
distro would have to go along with it.

The dependency breakages (or, at a minimum, package rebuilds) required 
are a hard enough maintenance problem that its better to just spin off a 
new distro than to deal with rifted library problems. Distros get hard 
to maintain pretty fast, which is why most distros don't make it very far.

Since both XFCE and KDE aren't part of SL or TUV's distro but come from 
EPEL (and probably other repos) its impossible to expect the SL team to 
decide to fork the entire distro for the sake of one window manager, as 
this is completely against their goals.