[kde-community] RFC: Distribution outreach program

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Freitag, 29. Januar 2016 21:46:25 CET Luca Beltrame wrote:
> 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 intention is not to blame any distribution for anything. The goal is to 
give users a way to identify distributions which fulfill the requirements for 
our software to run optimally. 

If for a specific distribution there are principles which are more important 
than meeting these requirements, then that's okay for the distribution and we 
don't blame them, but users should know that they can't expect KDE software to 
work perfectly on that distribution, and they should not blame us for it.
 
> > 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).

There should be a communication channel for distributions to notify us "Hey, 
we know we currently don't meet the dependency requirements because of this 
and that problem, but we're working on it", so if whoever administers the 
outreach program can cut the distribution some slack.

> 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.

That is fine as well: If we know that, we know when we can expect current 
packages to arrive in that distribution. And unless these processes take 
months to complete, it should not be much of a problem (unless it's about a 
critical security vulnerability, but distributions have special processes to 
get those fixed asap anyway, don't they?)

> > 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.

Would a "Runs KDE software optimally" kind of badge not be perceived as an 
endorsement?