[kde-community] RFC: Distribution outreach program

[Luca Beltrame]

Il Fri, 29 Jan 2016 18:09:23 +0100, Thomas Pfeiffer ha scritto:

> 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

The only way a distro that doesn't update to major version can cope with 
this is through patching, or to update to the latest state of the branch. 
Patching is problematic, branch updates can cause regressions. 

I'm not saying that this attitude is good or bad: I'm playing devil's 
advocate and think in the perspective of the distros. In openSUSE we had 
permission to submit new major versions as so-called "maintenance updates" 
and IIRC Fedora does the same sometimes (feel free to correct me), but 
most of the distros (save rolling like Arch) don't.

> 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

However sometimes dependencies don't integrate too well with the distro, 
or need additional time to get worked out. Case in point: the current kdev-
python beta *requires* Python 3.5 to work. Up until a few weeks ago, Python 
3.5 could not get into openSUSE Tumbleweed due to some other, unrelated 
issues. 

This means that kdev-python was not packageable until that issue was fixed 
(it is now). 

Other issues may be distro processes: again I'm speaking about openSUSE as 
I know most of the process, but new packages (so even deps) need to go 
through legal and security review, and that may take time. 

> 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

My issue is mainly to prevent "perceived endorsement", which I think should 
be avoided. 

-- 
Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team
KDE Science supporter
GPG key ID: A29D259B