[Kde-pim] Permission to forward port "folder white listing" from Enterprise branch to 3.5

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sunday 16 March 2008, Till Adam wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 March 2008 23:34:06 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > On Wednesday 12 March 2008, Thomas McGuire wrote:
[snip]
> > > I assume it is tested in the enterprise branch, so it probably is
> > > reasonable bug-free to port it to the 3.5 branch. In general, I'm
> > > OK with it. Ingo, any opinion on this?
> >
> > Considering the recent corruption of binary attachments which
> > wasn't discovered in the enterprise branch for 21 days and was then
> > merged to the 3.5 branch makes me very sceptical. As such I don't
> > want any feature to be merged to the 3.5 branch which has not been
> > thoroughly reviewed and tested. If it has been reviewed and tested,
> > then I'm okay with the merge. I'm sorry, but I don't have the time
> > to review it myself.
>
> Ingo, there's always a tradeoff between merging new functionality
> into all branches quickly, which helps find regressions faster (as it
> did in this case) and helps us keep the delta between branches as
> small as possible, and letting changes mature in one branch first,
> before back or forward porting, at the risk of many users missing out
> on things, merging becoming harder, patches getting dropped, etc. At
> the current point in time, where no 3.5 nor trunk release is
> emminent, our approach is to merge quickly, since that seems to be
> the lesser evil. I think 3.5 branch has benefited from that approach
> overall, for the past two releases.

It surely did. No doubt about it. But...


> In the case of the attachment corruption the patch was picked up by
> the OpenSuse build service, the resulting packages were tested by
> adventurous users, the problem was found and fixed. In this case this
> process happened faster than the regression testing cycle in
> enterprise branch, where the bug was discovered a few days later.

But this bug was so obvious that it should have been discovered much 
earlier by the most basic function test. If I had changed something 
with respect to attachments I had at least tried to create a test 
message to check whether it works. I know that this costs time and thus 
money since you are paid for working on KDE PIM (which I think is 
awesome). Anyway, maybe it was briefly tested and the bug went 
unnoticed. Let's move on.


> In 
> my view this is Free Software synergy at its best and not a problem,
> unless such regressions creep into releases. That doesn't mean that
> we didn't make a mistake in this case, causing an avoidable
> regression, for which I apologize, but mistakes happen, and there was
> no harm done to all but some bleeding edge users. I'd much rather
> live with that than end up with another proko2 branch, which went so
> far away from mainline kdepim that we are only now able to finish
> merging the last bits and pieces that went only there, namely the
> feature pradeepto was talking about.

I fully agree that we shouldn't go this way again.


> It's a feature, strictly 
> speaking, which is why I'd be fine with it only going into trunk, not
> 3.5, if the maintainers feel it's too much of a risk, or there's not
> enough time to clean up the remaining issues with it before the next
> point release.

As I wrote above:
> > If it has been reviewed and tested, then I'm okay with the merge.

> (Note: the "we" in the above is the KDEPIM/Kolab team at KDAB, namely
> myself, Volker, Pradeepto, Kevin, Andreas, Thomas, Marc, Frank,
> Laurent and Jaroslaw, with varying degrees of involvement)

I take this opportunity to thank all of you for all the wonderful work 
you are doing for KDE PIM. Thanks, guys!


Regards,
Ingo
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