KDE Frameworks Release Cycle

[David Faure]

[Taking k-c-d out, too much cross-posting]

On Monday 05 May 2014 21:54:42 Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> If we have more than 50 libraries, do all of them need a full new release 
> every month ?

Not doing that leads to 

1) a huge mess of versioning. The latest available version for each framework 
would be different, so how do you make sure you have the latest of each? And 
the "min required version" in each find_package would have to be increased 
manually, since it would no longer be the same everywhere.
In a year we'd be at KArchive 5.3, KIO 5.7 required by KParts 5.1 required by 
KTextEditor 5.4, etc. etc.
This seems extremely messy to deal with, for everyone.
We decided long ago against this, for these very reasons.

2) more work for me: every month, for each of the 61 frameworks, I'd have to 
decide which ones need to be released and which one shouldn't....

> As Luigi says, some of the smaller libraries may not see many changes at
> all,  and maybe only "old style" patch level releases for them would be
> good enough ?

That's exactly what will happen for the frameworks which didn't see many 
changes. The monthly release will include at most a few bugfixes and updated 
translations. The only difference is whether to call this 5.2 or 5.1.1 -- but 
again, these are libraries, so e.g. new methods don't break existing apps, the 
fear of "new features" doesn't work the same way as in applications.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE Frameworks 5