Fwd: Synchronized release schedule for Plasma

[Rik Mills]

The current schedule does in fact mostly work for Kubuntu.

We do not want to be shipping on the ISO and in the main Ubuntu archive
an early .0, .1, .2, etc point release which perhaps still has
significant bugs yet to fix.

Currently the Plasma schedule allows up to have the latest Plasma which
has had plenty of bugfixing love applied, which is usually the .4 or .5
point release.

Adjusting the Plasma schedule so that a initial .0 Plasma release comes
just in time for our freeze dates would be of little to zero benefit, as
we would never ship that to end users as part of an official K/Ubuntu
release. Instead, as we do when we can, we have "here is something for
you to test if you want" build in a PPA, which is not beholden to the
distro and Plasma release cadence.

Rik Mills
Kubuntu

On 24/11/2020 16:09, David Edmundson wrote:
> We had this email from Fedora.  I would welcome thoughts from other
> distributions.
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: *Timothée Ravier* <travier at redhat.com <mailto:travier at redhat.com>>
> Date: Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 3:07 PM
> Subject: Synchronized release schedule for Plasma
> To: <kde-devel at kde.org <mailto:kde-devel at kde.org>>,
> <plasma-devel at kde.org <mailto:plasma-devel at kde.org>>
> 
> 
> Hi KDE/Plasma developers!
> 
> Nowadays, Fedora and Kubuntu make new releases twice a year within a
> week of each other, with relatively predictable release schedules.
> 
> Unfortunately, new KDE/Plasma releases happen a little bit too late for
> them to be included in those distributions in time for the release. Thus
> the current version of KDE/Plamsa in both Fedora and Kubuntu is one
> release behind (at least on release day). It may or may not be updated
> after the release.
> 
> For the Fedora KDE SIG, we have an issue about this:
> https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/25
> 
> As distribution package maintainers, we would like Plasma developers to
> slightly alter the release schedule to align releases with a more
> distribution friendly cycle. You could consider shortening one release
> cycle (and then keep the 6 month schedule) to align releases.
> 
> With this schedule in place, we would also benefit from more beta
> releases over a slightly longer period. They would be packaged into the
> beta and RC releases of those distributions thus enabling more
> pre-release testing.
> 
> All of this would benefit both upstream and downstream:
> 
>   - More pre-release and just released software testing as users test
> the new distribution version directly with the KDE beta and fresh stable
> releases
>   - More updated and happy users using the latest release
>   - Less bugs reported against older releases, more bugs reported before
> the final stable releases
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Timothée Ravier for the Fedora KDE SIG
> 
> -- 
> 
> Timothée Ravier
> 
> Red Hat & Fedora CoreOS Engineer
> 
> Red Hat<https://www.redhat.com/>
> 
> travier at redhat.com <mailto:travier at redhat.com>    IM: travier
> 
> <https://www.redhat.com/>
>