[kde-community] Some proposals for discussion about future releases

[Mario Fux]

Good morning

With the KDE Frameworks 5 [1] and Plasma [2] well underway the only thing of 
the old KDE Software Collection are the KDE Applications that don't yet have a 
release plan or schedule for the Qt5/KF5 port. Beneath these big changes in a 
lot of our software there are quite a few other changing and exciting things 
like:
- New Qt based software like GCompris and Kronometer
- New software for the web like Bodega and WikiFM
- Even greater hardware projects like the Improv and Vivaldi
- And other things like the new KDE Manifesto and our new Visual Design Group

Everything under the KDE umbrella and in the KDE family. I'd like to take this 
time to discuss some ideas for future releases of our software. How we could 
reorganize it, what we could formalize and where we need decisions. So this 
email is the start of a series of proposals to discuss here and to then get an 
agreement on.

The following three (or more ;-) proposals are mostly independent:
- Proposal email One: KDE (Core) Apps and Suites
- Proposal email Two: The Sigma Release Days and independent releases
- Proposal email Tre: More formal release and announcement processes
- Proposal email For: More architectures/platforms for KDE's CI

They will be sent to this mailing list in a minute and are quite short in text 
and that on purpose. We can't yet discuss these things in every detail but we 
want to paint the direction in which we are planning to go.

Short disclaimer: With these ideas I'm sitting on the shoulders of giants as 
you. I don't want to steal ideas or that it looks like I stole them.
These are proposals based on several threads, IRC discussions, personal 
discussions and other summaries.

Another thing, not included in these proposals, is the KDE Applications 4.14 
release schedule [3] and if we want to make KDE Applications 4.14 an LTS 
release till August 2015 (when the Plasma 4.11.x LTS release ends) or if there 
should be another 4.15 release. But this discussion should be held on the 
release-team mailing list [4].

So thanks for reading and tell me your opinion and constructive feedback to 
these proposals. Try to keep it short and precise and I'll try to keep record 
of numberous opinions and ideas and will post summaries in one or two weeks. 
Details can be discussed in Randa and/or at Akademy. So let's concentrate on 
the bigger ideas.

Best regards and hugs
Mario

PS: Don't sent email to this thread for ideas to the proposals mentioned 
above.

[1] http://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Epics
[2] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma/2014.6_Release_Schedule
[3] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.14_Release_Schedule
[4] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team