Proposal unify back our release schedules

[Jakob Petsovits]

Others have made convincing arguments for not tying the projects together from an engineering point of view, which I find easy to agree with. I also like the current monthly KF schedule in that it allows me to submit MRs early on in a Plasma development cycle and use them in Plasma shortly afterwards. If KF release cycles were longer, there would be more of an incentive to just stick everything into a common library within Plasma directly, which doesn't benefit as many people.

What could also help with proper isolation of components is a change in build system defaults. If I call kdesrc-build today with --include-dependencies for any Plasma or Gear app, by default it will build all KF dependencies from source. Now that all the megarelease is out, we might want to consider relying on distro packages for KF6 by default, in the same way that Qt is not built by default either. This would underscore the nature of Plasma and Gear master relying on released KF, and save some wasted energy for people who aren't contributing to KF.

But I also wanted to emphasize that we're actually that far off from the marketing aim either. Aligned releases are still very doable without forcing everyone into a "live at HEAD" model. Neal's suggestion deserves a closer look imho:

On Fri, Apr 19, 2024, at 11:50 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> One way I think that would work well would be to realign the schedules
> so that when Plasma shifts to semi-annual releases, Frameworks and
> Gear would be re-aligned so that there *would* be a release that lines
> up with it. That doesn't mean both can't continue to have more
> releases separately, but having a release that lines up for Plasma
> would help things considerably.
>
> The monthly release of KDE Frameworks has its downsides, and I think
> in one conversation elsewhere, I suggested that KF moves to a
> quarterly release cadence, where two of the releases line up with
> Plasma to become MegaReleases. Gear already releases three times a
> year, and switching to four times might not be so bad.
>
> But even if KF doesn't change and remains monthly, then it still can work.

This would mean:

KF: every month
Gear: every 3 months
Plasma: every 6 months

With Gear and Plasma aligning for a semi-yearly release. Stand-alone Gear releases get their extra announcement when the full Plasma+Gear announcement is far into the past and future, with no promo timing conflicts to worry about.

Honestly I don't think that KF even needs to be aligned at all if it sticks to monthly: Assuming an expanded QA/beta/bugfix period (at least 4-6 weeks?) that the longer 6-month cycle surely deserves, any KF fixes from the beta period will either get released before Plasma is even out, or very soon after.

Perhaps an extra patch-level release of KF can be inserted around the time of Plasma's .0 if an important fix is needed fast. Switching KF from monthly to semi-yearly seems overkill if we just need to get post-release fixes out a little sooner.

- Jakob