Proposal unify back our release schedules

[Carl Schwan]

Hello Community,

I know this might be a controversial idea, but I would like to propose reunify
our release schedules. I feel like splitting our releases schedules between
Frameworks, Plasma and Gear is not working as well as we intended it to be when
we split the releases schedules for Plasma 5. This is for multiple reasons:

* We end up with 3 different products which are released at different times but
  are connected together. Apps and Plasma both need Framework, Plasma needs some
  packages from gear like kio-extra, Gear needs some package from Plasma like
  Breeze. Coordinating all these inter-groups dependencies is complex and was one
  the reason we had to do a megarelease for Plasma 6. Also for the end user, one
  product is a lot easier to understand.

* This results in very frequent releases which creates a lot of work for distros
  and talking with some distro maintainers they seems to agree that having a big
  releases every 4 months is better than having constantly a new minor or major
  release from either Framework, Gear or Plasma.

* We currently don't have a stable branch for Framework and it takes often up to
  one month for fixes to be deployed. The Framework releases is also not in sync
  with either Gear nor Plasma while these two modules heavily make use of Framework
  and contribute to Framework.

* We could have an unified LTS release including more than just Plasma. This is
  something that distros have been asking for some time already because having
  just Plasma receiving bug-fixes but not Framework nor the apps is not that helpful.

* In term of promotion, it is very difficult to advertise the 3 releases because
  combined we have an important release of either Gear, Plasma or Framework every
  few weeks. This is too frequent and often while a combined announcement would
  have enough content to be published in a tech newspaper. When splitting the content
  accross 2 announcements (Gear and Plasma), we reduce the content per
  announcement and this makes it less interesting for the journalists to write
  about us. This doesn't come from me, this is that some journalists directly
  told me.

* We won't have 3 different release teams but instead have a bigger one with a
  bigger bus factor. We could also unify the tooling for doing this mass releases
  a bit.

I do understand that there was valid reasons for splitting KDE Software Collection
for Plasma 5 but I don't think this worked out. These were as far as I know the
main arguments used for splitting the Software Collection.

* Trying to move away from "KDE" being recognized as the software instead of the
  community. This unfortunately didn't really work out, everyone is still using
  KDE to refer to the desktop. Even distros call their edition "KDE" and I don't blame
  them, it's difficult to find a better term than that as for example "Fedora KDE Spin"
  not only contains Plasma but also a lot of KDE apps. Splitting the releases won't
  help with that, we need to find a better approach or just let it go and accept that
  people will keep using KDE to describe the desktop/software.

* Better promotion of our apps outside of Plasma. This is a valid point but I think
  pursuing our current strategy of putting our apps in many app store to be more
  effective. We could also show the platforms support of each applications more
  prominently in our releases announcements like we already do on apps.kde.org
  (e.g. https://apps.kde.org/okular/). Generally Plasma releases fare a lot better
  in term of promotion than the gear announcements and showing the applications
  on an unified announcement would likely help spread the words about our applications
  better.

* Helps with outside usage of our frameworks. These didn't get as much success
  as we were hoping when splitting. I think having a stable branch for Framework
  might help but this is only a guess. It would be interesting to know of cases
  where people considered using some Framework and to know why they decided
  against or for it and if this proposal would helps or not.

In effect this proposal would mean:

* We do one major release every 4 months and then minor releases with a frequency
  based on the Fibonacci numbers as this releases cycle works very well for
  Plasma. Naming could be either YY.MM or Major.Minor.Path. We could unify that
  for one or the other one. Or let each component keep their current versioning
  scheme depending whether we want to merge Plama and Gear as product or
  keep it separate. I'm a bit undecided about this.

* "KDE Framework" will still exists as an entity and its ABI and API
  compatibility requirement. Only change is the release frequency and the introduction
  of a stable branch in sync with the other components.

* Only have one release announcement on our website. We can call it Megarelease
  6.XX like we did for Plasma 6/Gear 24.02 or find a better name. I would avoid reusing
  Software Collection first because the name is quite technical and second because
  these was already used in the past.

Currently this is just a proposal, not a vote proposal or anything like that. I'll be
happy to receive positive or negative feedback on this idea.

Cheers,
Carl
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