Releases in 3 months

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday, July 13, 2013 09:50:21 Luca Beltrame wrote:
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > 1. packagers seem to feel that if upstream doesn’t do the actual commit to
> > the upstream repository, then upstream is not maintaining their software
> 
> To be honest, that's not always true.

Good :)

> At least the major distributions and a
> few of the minors have packagers that hold KDE developers accounts. The

Yes ...


> problem is, as I can see, numbers (those people are a minor percentage of
> $DISTRO_CONTRIBUTORS and they also do packaging) 

Which is why I wrote: 

"we should try to recruit more people from the  user community of downstream 
distributions who have the skills necessary to merge patches and test. some 
distributions do this already.” 

> and sometimes expertise (I
> can touch CMake files and perhaps do little adjustments in C++, but nowhere
> near fixing complex bugs).

Backporting usually does not require that level of skill with C++. When it 
does, we can certainly call on upstream developers to help out. 

Most of  the changes that would appear in these extended bug fix releases would 
be just that: backports. A bug fixed in x.y.z should appear in x.y+1, after 
all. A significant % of code changes in bug fix releases tend to be backported 
fixes.

Exceptions to that most often occur where the code has changed significantly in 
a future release in such a way that the bug simply no longer exists in that 
future release; we’ve done that a few times over the years in Plasma Desktop 
by replacing a plasmoid (for instance) completely. Then backporting is not so 
much of an option without taking the whole new plasmoid (which usually isn’t a 
good idea). In which case, one may just have to live with the bug in the older 
versions.

The question is whether the above is a reason to not have 3 month release 
cycles? (Or whatever # of months is agreed on, where that # is less than 6)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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