openSUSE packagers' take on the 3 month release cycle

[Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer]

Hi, one of Debian's Qt/KDE packagers here.

Àlex Fiestas wrote:
> On Monday 08 July 2013 20:35:22 Luca Beltrame wrote:
>> (apologies for breaking your threading, but I'm not subscribed to k-c-d;
>> in fact, please CC me with replies, thanks!)
>> 
>> Currently, the people working on openSUSE packages are against the
>> proposal. A detailed explanation follows.
>> 
>> First and foremost, the KDE packaging in openSUSE is almost completely
>> community driven. This means that most of the work is done by volounteers
>> which handle what they can in their (limited) time. Faster releases may
>> mean worse packaging and increased maintenance (and I think this is also
>> an issue w/most non rolling distros).
> Well, KDE is also ran by volunteers doing what they can in their limited
> time. If we can achieve 3 month releases, meaning developing features,
> promo, i18n, etc I'm sure you can package it as well.
> 
> My question to you (all distro people) is, what can we do to help? and
> what is more interesting, what can you do, distro people, to help
> yourselves?
> 
> I see at least a duplicated effort across all distros which is
> "adding/figuring out" new dependencies. Can't we coordinate on that so
> everybody life is easier?

First of all, thanks for this nice thread, it's awesome to see it well 
discussed :)

WRT licenses: whatever we can do to improve the situation here will surely 
help us **a lot**, no matter what the schedule is.

The same can be applied to dependencies, of course.

> Also, what can we do, upstream to make this happen? so far what I read in
> this thread is "This doesn't work perfectly for us, -1", what I'd love to
> read is a "This as it is won't work for us, but if we do X and Y and Z,
> maybe we can do it".

There are some factors that you can't simply manage, distro side. For 
example, every new major upstream release requires a transition in our side, 
to allow build-dependencies be correctly rebuilt. And that requires distro 
coordination (in our case, with the release team).

We are currently waiting for an ACK to push KDE 4.10 to unstable. For more 
than a month.

Of course, this is not somthing the you folks can help (at least as far as I 
understand it), but shortening the release cycle will surely not help us.