Which liist to use for non-KF5/non-Plasma/non-Applications product prerelease announcement to packagers?

Friedrich W. H. Kossebau kossebau at kde.org
Tue May 31 01:33:19 BST 2016


Am Montag, 30. Mai 2016, 23:09:11 CEST schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> El dilluns, 30 de maig de 2016, a les 18:14:40 CEST, Friedrich W. H.
> Kossebau
> va escriure:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > for those libs/apps which are not released as part of "KF5", "Plasma" or
> > "Applications", but with own release management/cycle, where would general
> > KDE products interested packagers expect the announcements to be done?
> 
> For the announcements themselves
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-announce-apps
> is in my opinion the correct list.
> 
> For pre-announcements besides the usual email to kde-i18n-doc so translators
> can give a final touch to translations i guess release-team wouldn't be bad
> to use (for "big things", nobody really cares today if i'm going to release
> rsibreak tomorrow).

Hm, why are you releasing rsibreak at all if you think nobody really cares 
about it? And are Gentoo users your only target group? :)

We need to solve the following for the "small" and the "big" projects 
(especially as there is no definition what is "big"). which I thought would be 
in the interest of all project maintainers, well, then at least many:

the big majority of the target group for the releases of KDE products are not 
people who compile things themselves. But people who are looking for and are 
relying on ready-to-install binaries/packages. Agreed? 
And releases are done by us usually by just releasing tarballs with source 
code, so nothing the majority can make use of. That is changing these days, 
more and more KDE projects are also providing binaries themselves. Still, 
usually not for the classic linux/bsd/whatever distributions, where we, the 
KDE projects, rely on the packagers belonging to those linux distributions to 
do the packaging.
And no matter if big or small, if KDE products have packages created for those 
linux/bsd/whatever distributions, they should be available on the day of the 
release (if possible, but packagers might be busy with other things after 
all). That is the very day when the release news will go around in the 
respective circles interested in that kind of software. That is the whole 
purpose of making a news item of the release, isn't it.

Distro packagers, your call as well, please tell where and how you expect the 
"big" and "small" projects to ping you in time for the upcoming release and 
the tarballs to use for creating packages, so you have them ready in time for 
official release news?
Think of Krita, KDevelop, Kexi, Calligra, Digikam, KXStitch, RSIBreak, 
GCompris, Kile, Krusader, Massif Visualizer, Kamoso, Yakuake, KMyMoney, 
Skrooge, Konversation, kdeconnect-kde, Krecipes, Kronometer, snorenotify, 
Purpose, Zanshin, and more I am missing here...
how do you find out if there is new stuff to be distributed by you? And how 
would you like to find out about it?
Or tell also if you do not care, even as rolling release distribution, and 
would rather like to see the KDE projects invest into appimages/flatpack/snap, 
when it comes to individual apps, libs and plugins we KDE projects create.

Motivation:
I do not expect the average packager to have the time to follow all 
communication of all the projects they are doing packages from to find out 
when there is a new package to be created, at least this is my experience. So 
my hope is that by having a dedicated channel for just the "tarball uploaded, 
release planned for day xyz, please ping if you have packages that can be 
mentioned in the release news or report packaging problems" chances will be 
improved that users of linux distributions can have their packages on release 
day, in links from the release news. Like it starts to be the case for Windows 
and OSX, which hurts for what I am here.

Cheers
Friedrich




More information about the Distributions mailing list