Synchronized release schedule for Plasma

[Aleix Pol]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 10:38 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 10:25 AM Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 5:10 PM David Edmundson <david at davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >>
> >>
> >> We have in the past shuffled things slightly to line up things up with distros on request, particularly LTS releases. We can certainly explore that on a one-off basis.
> >>
> >> >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.
> >>
> >> We did have 6 month release cycles in the past.
> >>
> >> The rationale for moving at the time was twofold:
> >>  - people rushed in changes towards the feature freeze as otherwise it would be aages till their changes reached users
> >>  - the more changes we have in a release, the more testing and inevitable regression fixes we need to do, spreading that out should result in things being more stable
> >>
> >> Initially we did every 3 months (which arguably still aligns) then it slowly slipped to 4.
> >>
> >> My personal impression is that releases have gotten better as a result of those changes, so I'm hesitant about reverting that decision.
> >>
> >
> >
> > Makes sense. With Qt being less of a moving target though, it could make sense to reevaluate our cadence though, both because we might start looking into the future and because the system we support should not be changing as much.
> >
>
> If we don't want to move to 6 months, pulling back from 4 months to 3
> months would make it easier for us to not miss Plasma releases.
>
> That being said, with Qt6 now being a thing, wouldn't that mean Qt is
> more of a moving target again?

It will take some time to be able to put together a release that's
fully tested against Qt 6.

Aleix