KDE 3.2 release cycle

[Aaron J. Seigo]

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On Sunday 11 May 2003 09:19, George Staikos wrote:
> > Anyways, of course this is just my opinion, but I think it's something
> > that should be seriously considered. I know KDE developers as a whole
> > don't really concern themselves about things like "buzz", but I think we
> > can already generate quite a bit with what has already been implemented.
>
>    Doing a release is not small undertaking.  It is a lot of work for the
> packagers, the release coordinator(s), the translators, the documentation
> team, and developers.

CVS snapshots meant as preview releases for developers/enthusiasts do not need 
to go through the motions of actual releases. translations don't need to be 
up to snuff, nor does documentation.

a set of tarballs that are the result of a cvs export && make -f Makefile.cvs 
should suffice... for that matter, a release of konstruct that is set up to 
grab a CVS version would probably be enough... if people could do this:

tar jxvf kdesnapshot.tar.bz2 && cd kdesnapshot/meta/everything && make install

and get a working kde CVS snapshot, that would be awesome... in fact, one 
would imagine that it would be possible to write a simple script that 
automatically cvs export's a set of KDE tarballs and uploads them to a well 
known server so that releasing a new snapshot is the matter of running a 
single command ... 

a short announcement to places like dot.kde.org, linuxtoday.com, lwn.net, etc 
would handle the PR.. no need for anything fancy.. just a general 
announcement.

this is better than anonymous CVS because:

 o it's easier to set up and build
 o snapshots can be made at points when KDE HEAD is more or less stable 
 o a "snapshot" release is less scary in the minds of most users i know than 
"CVS" is
 o it gives us an excuse for periodic communication to our 
enthusiast/developer user base

there would be the potential for more bug reports ... but that's another 
matter.. we really need a bug triage project ...

both bug triage and doing CVS snapshots is something that people outside of 
the regular KDE development community could do... again it comes back to 
community building within the user community... 

>  KDE becomes more complex with each release, and each
> release requires more work to test and polish.  HEAD is definitely not
> stable yet, and there are major unresolved issues.  3.1.x, however, is
> quite stable and making sure that the it receives regular bugfixes is a
> good way to provide users who don't use CVS-HEAD.

this isn't about providing users, it's about providing enthusiasts and 
developers who wish to keep up with KDE development. these are important 
members of our community.

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE: The 'K' is for 'kick ass'
http://www.kde.org       http://promo.kde.org/3.1/feature_guide.php
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