Releases in 3 months

[Martin Graesslin]

On Wednesday 10 July 2013 17:13:11 Sune Vuorela wrote:
> On 2013-07-10, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> >=3D=3D On scheduling mainenance releases
> >
> > in a longer 4 month cycle, i=E2=80=99d cut that to 8 weeks and keep jus=
> > t the  one=20
> > update.
> > 
> > this would ease the burdon on our release team (and by extension packag=
> > ers)=20
> > while also giving developers more time to get better tested fixes in.
> 
> I don't think that it would lessen the burden on anyone. And as long as
> our quality of our stable releases is like they are, we need the first
> couple of point releases early.
Sorry, but you are doing an incorrect conclusion here. People don't test betas 
and wait for the .0 because that's the stable release. It results in .0 not 
being stable as the beta has not been tested. So people wait for .1 because .0 
is not stable enough. That results in .1 not being stable because nobody 
tested the betas and the .0. If we go by that in the end also the .4 will not 
be stable which is used by Debian.

We need to get away from "it's not stable enough" to "it's stable". The only 
way is to increase the testing and make everything we can do to have an 
awesome and rocking .0. I think Alex approach is the right one. Reducing the 
number of features going into a release reduces automatically the number of 
possible problems. Having master in an always releasable state means there 
cannot be lots of problems. And I know what I'm talking about, KWin follows 
the always releasable master for years, because too many people rely on KWin 
master working properly.

It's just a matter of discipline and I highly recommend to go to the Quality 
talk on Saturday with nice stories by vhanda and me how we f***d up from a 
quality perspective and what we learned from it. My main topic of the talk 
will be "stable updates are untested". Today when I drafted the slide I 
thought about calling our point releases "Schrödinger's KDE" - you don't know 
whether the release is good or bad till you tried it. And that's only the case 
for the point releases, the .0 is way better tested.

Cheers
Martin