Proposed adjustments to our release cycles

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Monday, June 18, 2012 11:52:46 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Saturday, June 16, 2012 08:18:05 Maksim Orlovich wrote:
> >...
> >
> >> 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.
> 
> With my KDE Quality Team hat on:
> 
> I think we should first of all solve one big problem here:
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Release_Team#Coordinator_List
> 
> As long as
> 
> kdelibs
> kde-baseapps
> kate

We've talked about these actually. First of all: kdelibs has an active 
maintainer, David Faure. This doesn't matter, however, since the proposal is a 
Frameworks5 timeframe proposal. From what I hear from the team, also 
Frameworks 5 will have an active maintainer.

For kde-baseapps, I suppose that they will move into the Applications release. 
They should have individual maintainers, but kde-baseapps as such would cease 
to exist.

Kate in that list seems a mistake, I know that it's actively maintained, maybe 
just needs poking the people (Christoph, Dominik, Anders, are you reading 
this? :)).

> don't even have a coordinator for releases, how do you expect to do
> this for the upcoming frameworks? Without a release coordination this
> will never work, as the current problems have shown.

Keep in mind that we won't be able to solve the problem if we adjust the scope 
in the process. This proposal is not about Frameworks5 release management.

> I also am quite skeptical about the tarballs: it was already difficult
> to get a 4.9 beta1 and it would never actually have happened without
> Albert jumping in because the existing release-team was not available.
> Thanks a lot again to Albert for doing that.

"was not available" is simply wrong. Allen, Albert and Torgny have worked on 
the releases. There were quality problems at first, but nothing really earth 
shattering for a first beta. We've done a few of them, and they're all a bit 
more painful than others. Yes, we can improve it, no, it's nothing to write 
home about.

Also, with CI systems in place, we'll be able to see this kind of problems 
much earlier.

> Comparing what we do with what the industry does is a bit blue-eyed as
> we don't even have the responsible people around when it is needed.

I'm pretty sure we do. :)
-- 
sebas

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