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

[Ian Wadham]

On 18/02/2014, at 6:11 AM, Albert Astals Cid wrote:

> El Dilluns, 17 de febrer de 2014, a les 12:59:27, Ian Wadham va escriure:
>> 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.

Sorry, I missed that.  Was there anything about it on kde-devel, the
general app-developers' list?

>> 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?

Ah yes, but how do I know whether there will be a 4.14 or 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.

After my commit yesterday and a stocktake I find I am in better shape
than I thought.  I think I can make it.

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

I started out that way, but swiftly got into a mess trying to synchronise
it with reviews and a bug fix.

> 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.

I am surprised that you think I would do that.  My practice is to develop and
test a group of changes as a series of local commits and push them only
when they are "working" together reasonably well.  In that way, many of
the new Palapeli features are already finished.  I am only worried about
the main one - the holders for pieces sorted from large puzzles - committed
yesterday.  It needs a little polishing, but I have tested it with puzzles of
8 to 10,000 pieces already.

>> 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.

Yes, but again, will there be a 4.14 or 4.15?

If KDE goes straight to KDE 5.0 and Qt 5, that's it for me.  I have already
announced my intention to retire from KDE Games this year and was aiming
for 4.13 to be my last major release, with only bug-fixing after that.

All the best, Ian W.