Versioning of Frameworks

[Christian Mollekopf]

On Tue, May 5, 2015, at 12:09 PM, Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 May 2015 11:33:03 Christian Mollekopf wrote:
> > What the regular releases IMO should be doing, is to take the latest
> > version from the "always releasable" master branch,
> > and be done with it (and that means not touching the library version,
> > because that's not the responsibility of the person who
> > releases, it's the responsibility of the maintainer of the library).
> > 
> > > - the fact that the workflow for frameworks (master always stable and
> > > releasable) does not require a distinction between bugfixes and features,
> > > like the KDE4 workflow required.
> > 
> > I'm not suggesting to change that, I'm asking to not take the library
> > version number away from maintainers
> > that need it as a vital tool for their release management. The result of
> > that release management will be a new version
> > in the master branch which can essentially be blindly packaged.
> 
> Currently release management in KDE means that the release management
> does the 
> increase of version numbers with the help of automated tools. This means
> that 
> I as a maintainer of multiple components don't have to follow the release 
> cycles of all the different components. I normally don't know when
> * frameworks tag
> * kde-workspace tag
> * applications tag
> 

I think it's very good that you don't have to worry about the release
cycle as a maintainer,
and I'd like to keep it that way.

> If you move the responsibility to increase version numbers to the
> maintainers, 
> I fear that we would have huge breakage. Just the fact that with the
> one-month 
> release cycle of frameworks a maintainer is no longer allowed to become
> ill 
> for more than three weeks or go on vacations for such a long time.
> 

No, it just means that a frameworks release can contain the same version
repeatedly if nothing has changed.

> If such a responsibility would be moved to the maintainers I would
> immediately 
> step down as a frameworks maintainer, because knowing myself I would more 
> often forget about it than not. Also it would add an additional workload
> on my 
> shoulders, which I don't have time for. 
> Automated tools are quite awesome
> to increase version numbers. Thank you very much to not require me to do it 
> manually!

Which is why I'm suggesting to make this optional. I don't agree that
bumping a version number
is any significant additional work, but if you feel it is then it's up
to you to make that decision.
I'd like a way to opt-out of that practice, where I'm doing the work.

Cheers,
Christian