Proposal unify back our release schedules

[Nate Graham]

Thanks for taking the time to assemble this email, Carl. These are 
arguments I've brought up individually myself for years, and I think 
they have merit.

Taken together, for me they paint a picture of a project that was 
attempted, faithfully executed on, but didn't end up delivering the 
benefits we hoped for while introducing some new drawbacks that have no 
easy path to being resolved. I'm in favor.

I expect a vast amount of discussion to result from this proposal, and I 
think that's great. It'll be good to talk about it. But I suspect in the 
end we'll likely not achieve 100% consensus, and in that event I'd like 
for us to put it to a formal KDE e.V. vote so that the topic doesn't 
become stale and die after everyone's exhausted from a long discussion.

Nate




On 4/19/24 11:04, Carl Schwan wrote:
> Hello Community,
> 
> I know this might be a controversial idea, but I would like to propose reunify
> our release schedules. I feel like splitting our releases schedules between
> Frameworks, Plasma and Gear is not working as well as we intended it to be when
> we split the releases schedules for Plasma 5. This is for multiple reasons:
> 
> * We end up with 3 different products which are released at different times but
>    are connected together. Apps and Plasma both need Framework, Plasma needs some
>    packages from gear like kio-extra, Gear needs some package from Plasma like
>    Breeze. Coordinating all these inter-groups dependencies is complex and was one
>    the reason we had to do a megarelease for Plasma 6. Also for the end user, one
>    product is a lot easier to understand.
> 
> * This results in very frequent releases which creates a lot of work for distros
>    and talking with some distro maintainers they seems to agree that having a big
>    releases every 4 months is better than having constantly a new minor or major
>    release from either Framework, Gear or Plasma.
> 
> * We currently don't have a stable branch for Framework and it takes often up to
>    one month for fixes to be deployed. The Framework releases is also not in sync
>    with either Gear nor Plasma while these two modules heavily make use of Framework
>    and contribute to Framework.
> 
> * We could have an unified LTS release including more than just Plasma. This is
>    something that distros have been asking for some time already because having
>    just Plasma receiving bug-fixes but not Framework nor the apps is not that helpful.
> 
> * In term of promotion, it is very difficult to advertise the 3 releases because
>    combined we have an important release of either Gear, Plasma or Framework every
>    few weeks. This is too frequent and often while a combined announcement would
>    have enough content to be published in a tech newspaper. When splitting the content
>    accross 2 announcements (Gear and Plasma), we reduce the content per
>    announcement and this makes it less interesting for the journalists to write
>    about us. This doesn't come from me, this is that some journalists directly
>    told me.
> 
> * We won't have 3 different release teams but instead have a bigger one with a
>    bigger bus factor. We could also unify the tooling for doing this mass releases
>    a bit.
> 
> I do understand that there was valid reasons for splitting KDE Software Collection
> for Plasma 5 but I don't think this worked out. These were as far as I know the
> main arguments used for splitting the Software Collection.
> 
> * Trying to move away from "KDE" being recognized as the software instead of the
>    community. This unfortunately didn't really work out, everyone is still using
>    KDE to refer to the desktop. Even distros call their edition "KDE" and I don't blame
>    them, it's difficult to find a better term than that as for example "Fedora KDE Spin"
>    not only contains Plasma but also a lot of KDE apps. Splitting the releases won't
>    help with that, we need to find a better approach or just let it go and accept that
>    people will keep using KDE to describe the desktop/software.
> 
> * Better promotion of our apps outside of Plasma. This is a valid point but I think
>    pursuing our current strategy of putting our apps in many app store to be more
>    effective. We could also show the platforms support of each applications more
>    prominently in our releases announcements like we already do on apps.kde.org
>    (e.g. https://apps.kde.org/okular/). Generally Plasma releases fare a lot better
>    in term of promotion than the gear announcements and showing the applications
>    on an unified announcement would likely help spread the words about our applications
>    better.
> 
> * Helps with outside usage of our frameworks. These didn't get as much success
>    as we were hoping when splitting. I think having a stable branch for Framework
>    might help but this is only a guess. It would be interesting to know of cases
>    where people considered using some Framework and to know why they decided
>    against or for it and if this proposal would helps or not.
> 
> In effect this proposal would mean:
> 
> * We do one major release every 4 months and then minor releases with a frequency
>    based on the Fibonacci numbers as this releases cycle works very well for
>    Plasma. Naming could be either YY.MM or Major.Minor.Path. We could unify that
>    for one or the other one. Or let each component keep their current versioning
>    scheme depending whether we want to merge Plama and Gear as product or
>    keep it separate. I'm a bit undecided about this.
> 
> * "KDE Framework" will still exists as an entity and its ABI and API
>    compatibility requirement. Only change is the release frequency and the introduction
>    of a stable branch in sync with the other components.
> 
> * Only have one release announcement on our website. We can call it Megarelease
>    6.XX like we did for Plasma 6/Gear 24.02 or find a better name. I would avoid reusing
>    Software Collection first because the name is quite technical and second because
>    these was already used in the past.
> 
> Currently this is just a proposal, not a vote proposal or anything like that. I'll be
> happy to receive positive or negative feedback on this idea.
> 
> Cheers,
> Carl