[kde-community] RFC: Distribution outreach program

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Freitag, 29. Januar 2016 16:44:49 CET Luca Beltrame wrote:
> Il Fri, 29 Jan 2016 17:06:14 +0100, Thomas Pfeiffer ha scritto:
> > I believe that we can improve the situation by intensifying our
> > cooperation with distributions even further. On the other hand, however,
> > distributions also have to do their part in order to make our software
> 
> Some distros already do this (Kubuntu, openSUSE). I've been wearing two
> hats (KDE and openSUSE) for a while exactly for this purpose: keep
> upstream-downstream relationships optimal.

Which is good and I think should be honored!
 
> >  - How fast do they have to deliver our newest major as well as minor
> >  releases - Which version of our dependencies they should ship with each
> 
> If we value just speed, this is kind of problematic by itself:
> - Some distros (Arch) are faster than others in pushing out updates by
> virtue of their model
> - Some distros will *not* be able to update due to policies (Debian)
> - Some distros will update but they won't be "fast" due to internal QA
> processes (e.g. openSUSE with openQA, but possibly others)

Good points!
Maybe the speed of upgrading as such is not the actual point. What I care 
about is the speed with which bugfixes reach end users. If a distribution 
decides to backport all bugfixes from a new major release to theirs and does 
that job well, I'm fine with that.
However we've seen in the past that some distros which won't ship the most 
recent release won't backport bugs fixed in it, either, leaving users with 
sometimes serious bugs for way too long. This is what should be avoided.

The same goes for dependencies: If a certain version of a dependency causes 
bugs with our software, it is the distribution's job to fix that situation, not 
ours. We should not have to work around outdated versions of something further 
down the stack.

> >  - With which options they should compile and package our software -
> 
> Most of them use all or almost all optional features.

These were just illustrative examples. Since I'm not a technical person, some 
of them may be irrelevant, I may have missed others. It should be the 
developers who set the criteria.

> [...]
> 
> > What do you think?
> 
> I would rather keep the badges but not do "special mentions" or something.
> Some distros may be very willing to improve their KDE software experience,
> but not able to do so due to policies.

Maybe not "special mentions", but when people come from our websites and want 
to know which distros ship our software, it would be nice for them to see 
right in that list which distros it works best on. We can also just write 
"Look out for our badge for the best experience" on the page, but that just 
shifts effort from us to the user.

> That said, I hope I don't sound too negative. I think it's a great idea
> and should be definitely pushed forward.

No no, you don't sound negative! I found your comments to be very constructive 
and helpful!

Thanks,
Thomas