[kde-community] Proposal One: KDE (Core) Apps and Suites

[Martin Klapetek]

On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Myriam Schweingruber <myriam at kde.org> wrote:

>
> Very simple: we try to get our releases out for the users and try to
> get into major distributions (not rolling ones), not for our own
> schedule's sake. And fixed release cycles are one thing, but the
> availability of the devs to push and polish their work is another one.
> Also: doing our own release in Amarok might look like more work, but
> we reach a greater audience than if we would stick into a KDE releases
> x.y.z and get a one liner mention in an endless list nobody ever reads
> anyway. When did anybody here read the full release text of the KDE SC
> releases, but those who wrote them? The longer it gets, the less
> likely anybody would read it, don't forget the tl::dr attitude of most
> people


> I fear we are again doing a lot of blabla but nobody thinks about the
> users perspective as usual. I understand if kdelibs devs or Solid or
> whatever underlying structure they work on don't think of users as
> their first target, but that is certainly not so for applications like
> Amarok. So if everybody would take a step back and think of to whom
> and where and how we want to achieve a better distribution, then
> strict release schedules, regardless of the actual length, are not
> really helpful, they are a constraint to people who work in their free
> time and we try to apply company rules to them. That just doesn't
> work. Alienating the non-rolling distributions by our new schedules
> doesn't help either, btw.
>

With my KDE Telepathy hat on (as a main co-maintainer and the dude that
does every other release), I'm putting +1 to that.

I keep seeing that the joint release would be "simpler", but to whom? The
release people (doing the packages) would suddenly have bazillion new
packages to do (just KTp has ~14 and it varies). I kinda don't want to hand
our release job to someone else as it's a bit specific process and afaik
it's not the same as the rest of KDE apps, so handing this over would
actually put *more* complexity onto the release team as suddenly they would
have to handle lots of apps with different release processes.

As for being simpler for promo - well, maybe. But the promo team would ask
us "hey, can you give us some text about your release" and we would have to
write one, but we do so now as well, except we can do bigger posts. Plus,
we would get lost in the endless list, like Myriam said. We actually used
to align our release with KDE SC but then decided to have some offset as
our impact to the users and media was far less than when released
standalone. True story.

I'm not sure if it would be simpler for translators either - sure, there
would be a "global" string freeze every month the same day, but it seems to
me like lots of work suddenly cumulates at once. But this is just my
thinking and I'm no translator.

Well I don't know, I don't want to be the nay-sayer, but these are my
thoughts on that.

Cheers
-- 
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
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