How to track the backport of important fixes?

[Elvis Angelaccio]

Hi,
there is a problem that hit me recently that I would like to discuss in
this new list.

The issue is the following: due to incompatibilities between different
release schedules, it may happen that a serious bug is introduced on a dead
branch (i.e. a branch that won't see any new upstream release).

In these cases, distributions who are stuck to those dead branches (because
of some policy X) are supposed to backport the fixes. If this does not
happen, the users of those distributions will be affected by serious bugs
and this results in a bad reputation for KDE.

This happened recently with Ark and Kubuntu.
The release of KXMLGui 5.17 exposed a serious bug in (at least) Ark and
Kate. Since at that time the Applications/15.08 branch was end-of-life, the
bugfix was released on master and (most) distributions got it with the
following Application 15.12 release.

However, at least Kubuntu has been stuck with Ark < 15.12 and KXMLGui >=
5.17, and their users get the Ark process to hang when closing the app.

I discovered this many weeks ago [1] and I asked the Kubuntu devs on IRC
whether they could backport the fix to the 15.08 branch. They told me that
they would do it, but apparently they didn't and today I discovered that
Kubuntu users are still affected.

Maybe IRC was not the right channel, maybe I should have contacted the
Kubuntu devs on the kde-distro-packaging list. Or maybe we need something
more, something that allows us to track in an easier way which bug gets
fixed in which distribution.

I think something related was discussed in the thread on kde-community
(e.g. using scripts to test whether distro X offers feature Y or bugfix Z).

What do you think?

Cheers,
Elvis

[1]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358215
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