More Plasma bug fix releases

[Martin Graesslin]

On Tuesday, October 27, 2015 2:18:01 PM CET Eric Hameleers wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > On Tuesday, October 27, 2015 06:25:42 AM Eric Hameleers wrote:
> >> I like the idea of getting more visibility for bugfixes that will give
> >> the enduser a better Plasma experience. Ideal for me would be a patch
> >> tracker (not the same as a bug tracker) where intermediate patches are
> >> made available that are scheduled for inclusion in the next release.
> >> That allows me as a package builder to assimilate those patches if I
> >> think they can not wait until the next release.
> > 
> > That sounds like you just want the latest stable git branch, in this
> > example Plasma/5.5?
> 
> No, of course not. I consider the git branch to be in eternal flux.
> The git HEAD may contain valuable usability patches but also other meh
> stuff that can wait until the next major release. I do not want to dig
> through hashes and commits to find out whether you solved some
> blocking issue.

Please never do that! You are risking the quality of the product. What you 
consider the "meh stuff" might be a very required patch to make the software 
work together with other patches.

I also understood your request for a patch tracker in the same way as sebas 
and Albert and that you just need a better way to get the patches from git. 
Anything else is not realistic. If I do a commit to a stable branch of course 
it is a required bug fix and not some "meh stuff". We have policies and we 
keep to it.

> A patch tracker, containing patches you (the developers) consider
> critical and which should find their way to the user ASAP, that is a
> place where I would look.

It doesn't work that way. Let's say I have this super critical bug fix done 
for 5.4.3, I mark that as critical in the patch tracker. Then you roll it out, 
what might happen:
a) it doesn't even compile
b) it breaks in horrible, horrible runtime ways

Why? Because it build up on a "not so super critical bug fix" from the 5.4.2 
release which you did not include.

This doesn't make sense. We will never be able to guarantee that this works. 
We have a stable release branch which gets CI tested. We don't have a random 
set of patches which gets CI tested. If we had that, well what would be the 
difference to the stable branch?

Anyway: I would like to come back to the actual discussion whether more bug 
fix releases can be delivered by the distributions.

Cheers
Martin
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