CI Requirements - Lessons Not Learnt?

[Martin Gräßlin]

Am 2017-01-12 04:00, schrieb Kevin Kofler:
> Martin Gräßlin wrote:
>> Email threads don't work to codify such requirements. What we need is
>> something like an "announce new dependency to sysadmin freeze" prior 
>> to
>> the dependency freeze in the release schedule. That's what I mean with
>> codifying it. We need to have it in a way where devs actually check.
>> It needs to be part of the process. An old email thread cannot be part
>> of the process.
> 
> IMHO, the rule should be: If you need a version of a system-level 
> dependency
> (such as xkbcommon – things that you can't just expect the KDE 
> packagers to
> upgrade willy nilly) that is not available (as an official stable 
> update) in
> the OLDEST supported releases of common distributions, you MUST #ifdef 
> it.
> Then there will also be no problem for the CI.

You know what happens when we ifdef the version of dependencies? Thinks 
break in distributions. They ignore the optional dependency and ship 
with the older one. Which results in issues we upstream developers have 
to care about. The quality of our product goes down and users complain 
about the lousy quality of plasma and the distribution.

The paramount issue resulting from it is the maintainer of a well known 
KDE distribution stepping down from his job complaining loudly in public 
about the lousy quality of KDE. I still remember the issues we had 
especially with Fedora due to incorrect dependencies in the early 5.x 
times.

I could tolerate a request to weaken our quality from anybody but you.

Cheers
Martin