KDE release cycles?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Saturday, 2012-04-07, dE . wrote:
> On 04/05/12 13:57, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > On Thursday, 2012-04-05, Duncan wrote:
> >> dE . posted on Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:23:16 +0530 as excerpted:
> >>> So 'feature release' may mean (apart form including absolutely new
> >>> features) -
> >>> 
> >>> 1) Restructuring the code (better management).
> >>> 2) New backend or changed backend which may increase or decrease bugs.
> >>> 
> >>> And bug fixes mean fixing small time bugs in library or directly in the
> >>> app.
> >> 
> >> I'll let Kevin respond to that (tho it seems a reasonable summary to
> >> this non-dev, here),
> > 
> > I agree. My guess is that the term "feature release" is used to indicate
> > that this is not just the same thing again.
> > 
> >  From a developer's perspective it just means that restrictions on what
> >  you can
> > 
> > do are less tight. There are still things that are not allowed, e.g.
> > changing libraries in a way that makes them incompatible with
> > applications, but on the application level you can do almost anything
> > you want.
> > 
> >> but there is certainly one practical limitation of the
> >> bugfix releases as opposed to feature releases:
> >> 
> >> * Strings are generally frozen during a six-month bugfix series.  This
> >> is to help the various l10n (localization, basically, translation)
> >> efforts, but it DOES mean a tradeoff in terms of fixing things
> >> "properly" sometimes, if that would mean a UI and string change, even
> >> if the actual code fix is reasonably small and "safe" and would
> >> otherwise be allowed.
> > 
> > Yes, very good observation. Sometimes an essential bug fix needs a string
> > change, in which case the translators usually grant an exception [1].
> > 
> >> This is actually one reason the distros tend to ship later bugfix
> >> releases instead of newer feature releases
> > 
> > One additional thing might be that distributions themselves use a very
> > similar development and release model so they have a better
> > understanding what each step along the way carries with it.
> > 
> > Early bug fix releases of a feature release are basically more like the
> > public beta of proprietary software, i.e. the beta releases of Free
> > Software products (and of distributions which do such things) are more
> > like the interal or private beta.
> 
> 'Early bug fix' release? I thought that bug fix releases were the minor
> versions like 4.8.1, or 4.8.2 etc...

Yes. What I wanted to say was early as in x.y.1 and x.y.2 as opposed to late 
as in x.y.5

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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