A proposal to release 2.9

[Heiko Becker]

Hello everybody,

On 01/26/18 13:45, Matěj Laitl wrote:
> Hi Stefano,
> I totally agree, 2.9 should be released to push the work done to users.

I agree, although I don't really know how adoption by distros will turn
out, considering Qt4 is EOL since quite some time, same for KDELibs
(although not that long).  But a release isn't that much effort and at
least shows some activity and maybe provides incentive to contribute and
if all that fails it's at least a fixed point before the port to Qt5/KF5.

> I unfortunately won't find time to do it myself, but: try to start
> making the release yourself! ;) It should be documented quite well.

I'd be willing to tackle this, if nobody steps up (which appears to be
the case at the moment, sorry if I stepped on any toes). Being a
packager and having done a few extragear releases with releaseme should
be quite helpful.

So, I propose the following schedule:

- 1 week to find out what can be fixed in short time with low manpower
or should be disabled (e.g cover search services)
- Create tarball afterward, give packagers and others some time to test
- If all goes well release on March, 5th
- Merge kf5 (which isn't unusable after the latest patches from Malte)
into master afterwards

> If you get stuck or need help with particular tasks, speak up on ML (and
> CC me), I'm quite confident somebody from us will help. (people usually
> procrastinate "big" tasks, but answering a concrete questions is much
> easier)

What I'm a bit unsure about is how to communicate the release. Something
along the lines "This release might not be as polished as past releases,
but there's some activity and bug fixes, a port to KF5 and any help is
certainly welcome."?

Cheers,
Heiko

> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 8:43 PM Stefano Pettini
> <stefano.pettini at gmail.com <mailto:stefano.pettini at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi Matej,
> 
>     have you received my last message to the mailing list? What's your
>     opinion? Sadly the project seems really abandoned, still it doesn't
>     mean we can't do a last release. I also wrote to Myriam, she didn't
>     answer, hope everything is fine.
> 
>     Stefano
> 
> 
>     ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>     From: *Stefano Pettini* <stefano.pettini at gmail.com
>     <mailto:stefano.pettini at gmail.com>>
>     Date: Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 10:05 AM
>     Subject: A proposal to release 2.9
>     To: amarok-devel at kde.org <mailto:amarok-devel at kde.org>
> 
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     it's many years now that Amarok 2.9 is about to be released. The
>     saturday-morning emails remember us weekly that there are still a
>     couple of regressions since years. In the meanwhile development
>     almost stopped, but not completely. I, like many, contributed with
>     small but important patches (otherwise we would haven't dedicated
>     time to provide such fixes).
> 
>     I think it's fair if the work since 2.8 is not wasted and 2.9 is
>     released.
> 
>     Current regressions are minor bugs, the only annoying thing not
>     working anymore is the cover search. But it's not a newly-introduced
>     regression, just the world changed and all the services used for
>     cover search become not available anymore. It's not a problem not
>     present in 2.8 that people would face when updating to 2.9. It's
>     already broken now.
> 
>     I would disable what doesn't work to not give false impressions,
>     removing the broken services from cover search, and release 2.9.
>     This would fix the access to wikipedia and other bugs we dedicated
>     time to.
> 
>     Cover search can be restored later, if developers find time to
>     dedicate to it and somebody reviews the available services and
>     select the suitable ones for the future Amarok.
> 
>     Regards,
>     Stefano