KDE 3.5.1 and 3.6

[Nicolas Goutte]

On Saturday 03 December 2005 15:47, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> On Saturday 03 December 2005 02:10, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> > >What is the state of "freeze" on branches/KDE right now?
> >
> > All of the branches on branches/KDE are frozen for good. That means no
> > new features and no new user-visible messages, but bug fixes (including
> > usability and accessibility ones) are allowed.
> >
> > >There are a number of changes I'd like to make in kdeaccessibility/kttsd
> > > and I'd rather not wait 1 to 2 years to make them publicly available.
> > >
> > >
> > >There are also a number of accessibility changes that ought to be made
> > > in kdelibs.  See the KOffice Accessibility Assessment here for details:
> > >
> > >http://accessibility.kde.org/reports/
> > >
> > >Is there going to be a 3.6 release and can I begin working on them in
> > >branches/KDE?
> >
> > No KDE 3.6 release is planned.
> >
> > >I suppose the answer comes down to: is anyone willing (and able) to be
> > > the release coordinator for a 3.6 release.
> >
> > What we will do is have 3.5.x releases. That's for certain.
> >
> > If, on the other hand, you introduce important changes to 3.5 that
> > require a break from message- and/or feature-freeze, we could have a
> > special release. We should target it for sometime around 6-9 months from
> > now.
> >
> > I wouldn't call it 3.6 because many applications have started moving off
> > to KDE4 and Qt4 codebases and development has stopped on the KDE3 code.
> > It wouldn't be a full KDE release.
> >
> > There are, however, applications that would benefit from another release
> > (Kopete 0.12 comes to mind, khtml and the PIM suite would probably go as
> > well). They could do releases of their own, though.
>
> I think it could be a good idea to have another intermediate "release"
> (call it "3.6" or any name you want; maybe an "Extragear Release"?) on
> the long way to 4.0. It could focus on featuring all the well working
> extragear stuff, based on basically unchanged kdelibs, plus some agreed
> upon new features like the ones Gary wants to implement.

khtml is in kdelibs, so if you release it, it is not a partial KDE release 
anymore.

(As for the "unchanged kdelibs", see what KDE 3.5 has become.)

>
> The main purposes would be
>  - "marketing", especially providing a coordinated PR to all the individual
>    apps which at other times do it all on their own (I'm thinking about the
>    wonderful stuff we have like k3b, amarok, taskjuggler, digikam, kimdaba,
>    gwenview, kopete, quanta, kommander....
>  - and bridging the long wait for our loyal users, give them something new
>    to use and evangelize about.
>

> But this all lives or dies with how the extragear app maintainers feel
> about this idea.

There was already an idea of release of combined extragear packages. I do not 
know how far this idea has gone forward, except the creation of
branches/stable/extragear.

Have a nice day!