KDE/4.11 branched what to do with kde-workspace?

[Thomas Lübking]

On Freitag, 12. Juli 2013 17:47:53 CEST, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 10, 2013 22:39:29 Thomas Lübking wrote:
>> There'll have to be (minor) patches to kde-workspace (you cannot keep
>> shipping known and fixable crashes), thus new tarballs and 
>> shipping kdelibs
>> 4.13.2, workspace 4.11.12 ("depending" on kdelibs 4.13.2) and kde-runtime
>> 4.13.2 does not sound very reasonable to me.
>
> regardless of what happens in 4.x for x >= 12 ...
>
> .. what do you think is going to happen wiith Plasma Workspaces 2?

That is completely unrelated.
The point was not "there's no scheme at all" but "unilaterally deviating from the scheme is confusing".

A break for KF5 or PW2 as it was for Xorg, that completely abandons former versioning is no problem.

But KDE has ever released as block and so far still releases as block.

If now ppl. get "mostly block and some bits of old block" that is far more confusing to them than always combining linux 2.4 and XR11v6 - or after a clear split (now) be fine about xorg stuff ranging from 1.04 to 1.14.2

You can expect "wrong" use of version tags, failing scripts and just poor users sitting in front of packages.ubuntu.com, searching for the proper package.


-

Also there will very likely be bugfixes suitable for some 4.11.x and bugfixes only suitable for a 4.12.0/4.13.0 release.

That means you will either
a) threaten users with patches in minor releases that would normally have gone into major ones
b) expect patch submitters to hold back their patch until 4.11 will no more tag 4.11.6 but the next one will be 4.12
c) introduce a tic-toc release for kde-workspace (advising conservatve distros to skip the odd ones, so "risky" patches are more tested for the even ones)
d) draw something else out of your magic hat.



As the major conflictive concerns seem that
a) a PW2 branch cannot be re-merged into master
b) ppl. will stumble about master being "something else"

i suggest to branch off PW2 AND 4.xx from current master.
Then freeze master in a way that makes it unusable for everyone.
No pushing, and ideally no (re-)checkout either.

On checkout, commit, clone or update attempts either get developers/distros/users a message, or (in case that's absolutely not possible) have at least a synthetic commit

---
kde-workspace is ABSOLUTELY FROZEN for the change to PW2

There're no updates and you cannot push local commits
upstream.
Please use PW2 to commit to future plasma-workspaces 2 or
4.xx to commit bugfixes for near major releases of "old" kde-workspace.
--

This way you'll maintain a clean "master -> PW2" history, no merge problem.
otoh you prevent any confusion about the nature of master *by git rules* and not some blog entry or whatever "big time" annoucenments you might have in mind, which frankly, and i'm sure you're absolutely aware of this, have reliably and more than once proven to completely fail in past incidents.

Cheers,
Thomas