Releases in 3 months

[Vishesh Handa]

>From my point of view, 3 month releases are going to actually increase
quality. At least in Nepomuk.

The Nepomuk developers (me included) have often merged feature
branches right before the feature freeze even if the branch has some
problems. No one wants to wait 8 months (2 months for the current
release, and 6 months for the next) for the users to get the feature
they are working quite hard on.

The end result is that certain things aren't always polished, and the
user experience suffers. With 3 month releases one can actually take a
decision and delay the feature by about 4-5 months, which is still
reasonable. 8 months is just too long to wait.

Additionally, with these 3 month releases I am more inclined to
release improvements for Nepomuk in 4.12. If 4.12 is supposed to be
released in January, I won't be working on any new features. I'll
start focusing on KF5, and the role Nepomuk will play over there.
Effectively making 4.11 the last release for Nepomuk as well.

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 6:34 PM, Àlex Fiestas <afiestas at kde.org> wrote:
> Now that kde-workspace and kdelibs are going to be frozen (which in theory
> means less work for everybody) I'd like to propose a new release schedule to
> be applied starting with 4.12.
>
> Basically the idea is to cut testing time and compensate it by keeping master
> always in a "releaseable" state, now that two major components are frozen it
> looks like it is a good time to get used to it.
>
> You can read all the proposal in:
> http://community.kde.org/KDE_Core/ReleasesProposal
>
> Before sending this email I have checked with distro people, i18n people,
> other developers and almost all of them seemed to either like or be neutral
> about it (only one exception :p) so I hope that the proposal is not a complete
> disaster.
>
> As its name indicates, it is a proposal, so please be constructive in the
> feedback, we can change as many things as we need.
>
> Finally, I have scheduled a Bof at Akademy, would be nice to have all the
> feedback from the community that is not able to come before it happens:
>
> http://community.kde.org/Akademy/2013/Wednesday#Room_A2_-_17_July
>
> Cheers !



--
Vishesh Handa