3.5.x weakened feature freeze

[Lubos Lunak]

 Hello,

 we (TWG) would like to slightly weaken the feature freeze for KDE3.5.x. And 
let's make one point clear first: We do NOT at all encourage further KDE3.x 
development, rather the opposite - we need people working on KDE4. However 
there will be a long time between KDE3.5.0 and KDE4 and there are already 
patches that would otherwise be in KDE3.6 if there was any and we'd like to 
allow some of those in.

 The requirements for a new feature to get in KDE3.5.x are:

- it needs to be already in trunk - we already have lot of code that went only 
into KDE3.5.x and not trunk, no need to make this even worse

- it needs to be complete and ready - don't ask "I plan to develop this 
feature for 3.5.x, will it get in?"

- it needs to be well-tested - create a branch or a patch and have it tested 
by other people, or even make independent public releases (kde-apps.org, in 
some distribution packages, whatever)

- it needs to respect other freezes - if no new i18n messages are allowed, no 
feature changing those is allowed either

- it needs to be committed no later than a month before the next release is 
tagged (right now there's no date for 3.5.3, but presumably all releases will 
be announced at least a month in advance)

- it must be mentioned in the changelog of the release (marked with "New:")

- commit log must include "approved by ..." and don't forget the FEATURE: tag 
where applicable

- last and the most important: It must be posted to the mailing list for the 
SVN module (kde-core-devel for those without) and must be approved by the 
module's maintainer (TWG for those without)

 If this proves to cause way too many trouble for any reason, this exception 
will be cancelled.


 Common sense translation:

The message is not "feature freeze is cancelled, but please be careful" but 
rather "feature freeze lasts, but finished features that are worth the risk 
may get an exception". It is meant for cases like "there is this bunch of 
large patches that improve KDE startup performance, they have received enough 
testing in packages for SUSE10.1 so they should be rock-stable and it would 
be really really nice to have them in official KDE but we can't only because 
of the freeze[*]". If somebody posts "I wrote this nice new kioslave 
yesterday afternoon, it seems to work just fine", prepare to get shot. If you 
start writing something new for 3.5.x in the hope that it will be included 
later, you risk being eventually refused. Nobody's stopping you from doing 
independent releases of your app though.


[*] Ok, yes, those are my patches. I'm quite sure there will be more patches 
like that though.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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