Proposal unify back our release schedules

[Nate Graham]

On 4/22/24 19:19, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El dilluns, 22 d’abril del 2024, a les 17:12:46 (CEST), Nate Graham va
> escriure:
>> Now, let's say we make Gear use Plasma's current release schedule by
>> syncing up the feature releases and adopting the Fibonacci bugfix
>> releases. If we don't end up changing Plasma's own release schedule then
>> we already make our promo store more coherent by letting the marketing
>> team do three big glossy announcements of user-facing products a year,
>> rather than being stretched thin for 6. Even if we make Plasma go down
>> to 2 releases a year, then we have two synced Gear+Plasma
>> "mega-releases" and 2 independent Gear releases--down from 6 to 4. Both
>> of these options would improve the promo story IMO.
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Moving on, the biggest points of contention I see revolve around
>> Frameworks. Personally I want to push back a bit on the idea of
>> developing an app against released frameworks.
> 
> I disagree.
> 
> In my ideal world, applications should be able to be built against a one year
> old frameworks, before the Qt6 port, Okular's minimum requirement was Ubuntu
> 22.04, which makes sure virtually everyone can contribute to it without having
> to build the world.
> 
> There's virtually no need in Okular to depend against any new frameworks shiny
> feature, the existing features are more than enough.
> 
> Cheers,
>    Albert

This is true for Okular, but we can't guarantee it for other apps.

However I was fortunate enough to be sitting across a table from Volker, 
who explained this point to me in a way that my tiny brain was capable 
of understanding: :) that having a fast Frameworks release cycle allows 
people developing apps with features in Frameworks to not have to live 
on master like we do in Plasma.

I'd love to have everywhere in my slide of KDE what Albert has for 
Okular, but I there are other barriers to it that we need to overcome.

As a result I'll rescind my idea to slow down Frameworks feature 
releases. I do still think Frameworks could benefit from un-branched 
bugfix releases a week after the feature releases--after which point 
feature development would be open again.

And I still support unifying or aligning the Gear and Plasma release 
schedules.

Nate