[kde-community] Applications hopping in and out of the coordinated release - was - Re: Applications in KDE Generation 5

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Thursday, January 16, 2014 11:23:23 Martin Graesslin wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 January 2014 23:06:26 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > El Dimecres, 15 de gener de 2014, a les 21:47:17, John Layt va escriure:
> > >
> > > We can still have a regular KDE Applications
> > > Release, but it is then up to individual communities or applications
> > > to opt in to that release cycle, or to decide to release on their own
> > > cycle.  Strong communities with a distinct identity in the wider FOSS
> > > world, like PIM or Games or Calligra, may find it better to have their
> > > own separate release cycles and promo efforts, but I suspect most will
> > > stay with the regular release cycle.
> >
> > Hopping in an out of a release cycle is a pain in the ass for those making
> > the release, at the moment we release around 160 git repos. If someone
> > needs to herd 160 (actually more since you want to split more stuff)
> > maintainers to find out what needs and what not every 4 weeks, you can
> > find
> > a lot of money for that guy since it's going to be the worst job ever.
> 
> sounds like we need better tooling to make the release happen then. I
> assume  we could put effort into making such a process work. After all we
> are a bunch of highly skilled hackers ;-)
> 
> My dream would be to just have to click a button on build.kde.org and it 
> starts to create the tarball, test compile and run unit tests. If all
> succeeds  put on ftp.kde.org. Reducing the amount of work so that the
> maintainer of the apps could do it themselves.

I think that solves maybe our side of the problem, but it will cause pain 
downstream. Whenever our set of packages or the structure of them change, 
there's all the distros that ship our software are going to have to change 
their packaging as well. Our own release management is just the tip of the 
iceberg.

This problem, it seems to me, can only be solved by a stable set of modules 
and structure.
-- 
sebas

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