[Kde-games-devel] Panic: KDE 4.13 schedule too tight for me

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Dilluns, 17 de febrer de 2014, a les 12:59:27, Ian Wadham va escriure:
> I am writing to KDE Games, hoping that Albert Astals Cid can advise me.
> 
> I just checked the schedule for KDE 4.13 and I see that most of the
> freeze dates are on 26 February 2014 and that is only 9 days away!
> Also there seems to be no soft v. hard freeze this time.
> 
> The final release is 16 April 2014, about two months later.

Yes

> Looking back over the schedules, it seems that KDE 4.11 had a total
> cycle of about 6 months after KDE 4.10 release (Feb 6 2013 to
> Aug 14 2013), whereas KDE 4.12 and KDE 4.13 have had about
> 4 months each (Aug 14 2013 to Dec 18 2013 and 16 April 2014).

Yes, that was widely discussed last year for 4.12. Also you got an email (as 
everyone with a commiter account did) when the 4.13 schedule was announced.

> A 4 month cycle leaves not much time for application development
> IMHO.  I realise that library and desktop resources are very likely
> going into KDE 5 and that there is probably not much left to do in
> KDE 4 library and desktop, but what about KDE 4 *applications*?

I don't see any problem with a 4 month cycle for releases. 

> Currently I have been working very hard on Palapeli development
> in the mistaken belief that we still had 6 month cycles and that I had
> 4 months or more in which to complete the design and development
> phase of the work.

You can take as many months as you want to develop features, noone forces you 
to ship the feature in 4.13, no?

> Now I find that I have had about 2 months for design and development,
> and those 2 months are very nearly up!

As said, you have infinite months of design and development time, noone is 
forcing you to release anything with 4.13

> What can I do?  

Ship your new features in 4.14? 4.15?

> I do not think I can meet the 26 Feb freeze, but
> neither do I wish to throw away all the work I have done so far
> on Palapeli.  The Message, Feature and Documentation freezes
> are my main worry.
> 
> I might be able to freeze the descriptions of the features by 26 Feb,
> but I doubt if I can finish writing the code by then.  Also I am finding
> that the features "evolve" a little as I write the code and try it out on
> large puzzles.  For example, I am now triggering the "close-up"
> zooming feature with a mouse button rather than the space bar.
> That is a small coding change, but a bigger change in UI, error
> messages and documentation.

Do this work in a git branch that is not master?

Note that master should be "always working", of course it can have bugs as all 
software will have bugs, but you shouldn't be commiting half finished features 
to it thinking to finish them later, there is people that use master as their 
main thing every day, and, ok, palapeli may not be the most important thing on 
the universe (ot it may :-)), but i'm sure they appreciate that palapeli 
master is in working condition.

> It also seems unlikely I can continue the work in KDE 5 and Qt 5.
> Three changes of library and desktop are enough for me and I am
> getting too old for another one ...  The transition to KDE 4 and Qt 4
> nearly killed me … :-)
> 
> So what are my options?

As said, if you can't have a feature ready for 4.13, just commit it to a 
separate branch and merge it to master when you are ready, be it 4.14 or 4.15.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> All the best, Ian W.
> 
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