Releases in 3 months

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday, July 12, 2013 10:12:41 Andras Mantia wrote:
> On Thursday, July 11, 2013 06:53:51 PM andrea diamantini wrote:
> > What about a single official development branch?
> > Just use two branches:
> > - master branch (stable)
> > - kdevel branch (devel)
> 
> The natural question to come is: why isn't master the devel branch? :)

because when there is no stable branch that tracks pre-release development, 
the # of people testing goes down.

which means there is no branch for people who would othewise like to follow 
development for testing purposes but who need something that is at least beta 
quality all of the time. that means no half-baked features or “this currently 
breaks X, Y and Z” commits.

there is a reason we don’t have more people running master. even many KDE 
application developers do NOT use self-built libs, workspace or other 
application. with kdesrc-build, time and effort are not the problems. 

one reason for not self-building the libraries is to make sure their 
application works properly with the current stable libs.

however, i know for a fact (because it’s been said to me many times by 
developers) that many do not use master because it is too much of a stability 
gamble.

what it comes down to is how much we care about people who would test, 
document or translate our software being able to track development closer.

if we don’t care much about that, then we can continue doing what we’re doing. 
if we do care, we ought to think of ways to make master more stable.

we’ve been able to move a lot more people to testing devel for  Plasma Active, 
for instance, since we adopted such an approach.


i also think that you’ll find, if you let yourself, that with git working in 
branches is not only pain free but it often saves a lot of effort. many times 
times i’ve quickly switched to master to fix a bug without first finishing the 
feature set i’m working on; many times i’ve switched to someone else’s feature 
branch to check on progress and try things out before they are fully ready, 
only to then switch back to master or to my own feature branch(es) to continue 
my work.

it’s a small change in how one works, and i know that change is hard :) .. but 
this one is sooooo worth it.

> Ok, let me reformulate again: did we had many breakage in master the past
> time that affected the official releases? Like we realized at branching
> time that master is (heavily) broken and we cannot start a new release?

no, we just released with breakage. or freaked out at the last moment with 
people predicting the sky will fall while others work their ass off to fix 
things. 

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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