Qt/KDE stack for Debian 11/bullseye

[Aurélien COUDERC]

Dear KDE !

A quick (*hem*) message to present myself and share some info about our plans 
for the incoming Debian release.
I’ve been working with the Debian Qt/KDE team for some months now to package 
the great KDE software for Debian. I’ve worked myself mainly on updating the 
KDE apps and bringing some newer ones to Debian.

We’re currently preparing for the release of Debian 11 codenamed « bullseye », 
due do be released when-it’s-ready™ ;-) so I thought I’d share some 
information about the versions we target. Hopefully it will be useful that our 
mix of version is known, to share more problem reports and fixes.

Given the release schedule and that we’re already in the first stage of the 
release « freeze », no major change will go in anymore and we’ll be shipping :
- Qt 5.15.2
- KF 5.78
- Plasma 5.20 + back/forwardport of 5.18 LTS fixes
- PIM 20.08.3
- Apps 20.12.x

Bullseye says hello to :
- elisa, kaidan, kio-fuse, kirigami-gallery, kuserfeedback, markdownpart, 
plasma-disks, plasma-systemmonitor, plasma-thunderbolt
welcome back to :
- kamoso
and bye bye to :
- kopete, kppp, kremotecontrol, kross-interpreters, kscd, plasma-mediacenter

It will have official support for 9 architectures [1] : amd64, arm64, armel, 
armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el and s390x.
You can find the build status for the team’s packages on these architectures 
on team’s QA page [2] in the « Buildd » column, alongside other useful 
information.

We/I plan to forward-port the Plasma 5.18 LTS fixes to 5.20 as long as it 
seems reasonable. If that’s of use to anyone I’m willing to post the MRs to 
the 5.20 branches on invent.kde.org too. Not that we would make direct use of 
it (we’ll ship patches as separate files in the package source tree) but that 
could make a common base for everyone interested.
Currently I’ve noticed 2 LTS commits to plasma-workspace and 2 on plasma-
desktop via the well known weekly ~kde release notes~ blog posts on Nate’s 
blog. Highlights on these are particularly welcome so we don’t miss any.


Feel free to join us :
- on the team’s mailing list (in copy),
- on the #debian-qt-kde IRC channel on OFTC.


I cannot end this email without mentioning the relentless and positive 
feedback and help we get from Rik Mills of Kubuntu. Thanks again ! <3


[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2021/01/msg00002.html
[2] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-qt-kde%40lists.debian.org 


Happy hacking !
--
Aurélien