Proposed adjustments to our release cycles

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Saturday, June 16, 2012 08:18:05 Maksim Orlovich wrote:
> How do you reconcile this proposal with our current troubles in 4.8.4,
> where you need certain particular combinations of two sets of
> libraries for things not to blow up? Your proposal increases the
> number of combinations in wide use, and hence makes testability worse.
> (And yes, we already have this problem with Qt --- where most new
> versions cause at least some noticeable bugs in KDE making updating Qt
> before a newer KDE release sometimes a net negative).

These interdependencies are as you say mainly caused by parts of kdelibs and 
thereunder. Moving to Frameworks 5, we'll need to figure out this problem 
anywway, otherwise we'll be hitting a concrete wall.

I imagine that a Frameworks release comes first (maybe somehow in rythm with 
Qt releases even), and that we'd put clear version requirements on the whole 
stack. (i.e. a Plasma release requires the last (two months old Frameworks), 
which requires the latest Qt. This would make our stack more predictable.

> > More specifically for the Workspaces, we would like to release all
> > workspaces
> > at the same time.
> > 
> > This model would
> > 
> > * Allow components to skip releases if they need to take a longer
> > development
> >
> >   cycle
> >
> > * encourage developers to have an always releasable master
> > * put more emphasis on continuous integration and other automated testing
> 
> What continuous integration and automated testing? How many apps have any?

That's the point, we need to improve here. Some of this can be done centrally, 
some will be with the apps developers. In the long run, we need to improve on 
our quality processes, the Testing team has identified that, and it's a high-
priority item in the release team as well. I hope we can create a culture with 
a sound (and not too ad-hoc) quality process, which allows us to be more 
flexible in our release management.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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