Releases in 3 months

[Àlex Fiestas]

On Wednesday 10 July 2013 18:26:55 you wrote:
> On Wednesday 10 of July 2013 18:08:04 Àlex Fiestas wrote:
> > On Wednesday 10 July 2013 13:22:20 Sune Vuorela wrote:
> > > On 2013-07-09, Sune Vuorela <nospam at vuorela.dk> wrote:
> > > > So. first one.
> > > 
> > > Second one
> > > 
> > > Release frequency.
> > > 
> > > We have a giant quality problem. Distros won't ship a .0 release to real
> > > users (as opposed to testers/power users) and wait until there has been
> > > a couple of bug fix releases. Until we ensure that our .0 releases are
> > > usable I don't see how we can cut down on that.
> > > 
> > > Some distros release in a 6 month cycle. Others in a 8. and ones even in
> > > longer cycles. Going for anything shorter than 6 months will ensure that
> > > distros are going to skip releases. why work with releases that they
> > > aren't going to ship to users anyways?
> > 
> > Not by distributions working that way I guess.
> > 
> > Part of the reasons why I want this release schedule is exactly for these
> > distros. Let me explain.
> > 
> > Right now distributions pick the release they see fit and make a distro
> > with it. It might be .0, .2 or .5.
> > 
> > If a distribution in their right decide to pick a .5 release wile a .0 is
> > already out there (this already happened), what is happening here is that
> > a
> > HUGE release with a LOT of changes won't even get to the users of that
> > distribution at least for another distribution cycle. This usually happens
> > with distributions that have a release cycle of 9 months.
> 
> The Linux kernel itself maintain old branches with big number of point
> releases. See 3.0.85, 3.2.48, 3.4.52, done by kernel developers.
Done by the kernel developers interested on those.

My proposal is to make the parties interested on this, actually do this.
> > [...]
> > 
> > > And as it currently is, we need the .4 and .5 releases.
> > 
> > and .6 and .7 and .8 and .9, we could have a 4.0.200, there is always need
> > of bugfixing releases, question is how many of these point releases are
> > pending of upstream KDE and not downstream distros.
> > 
> > To make it clear, I WANT to have .4 and .5 releases, just not made by
> > upstream developers.
> 
> Uhm... are you sure this will work? It can work for paid contributors, but
> not for unpaid ones. Moreover, this means that it's fine if users don't
> receive
> the last version, which was one of your goals stated above:
I can't fight with distros, and I don't want to fight with them. If distros 
need .5 .6 and .200 so be it, just they will have to do them themselves (and I 
hope we can make the process smooth so they can actually do it).

As has been said in this thread, almost no KDE developer is using the stable 
branch, blindly backporting has shown to be dangerous and has created many 
issues in the past so we are not the right people to make these point 
releases.