changelogs and kde sc 4.7

Wed Mar 7 13:27:16 GMT 2012

shirish शिरीष posted on Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:11:10 +0530 as excerpted:

>  A request to all, please CC me if somebody answers as I have turned
> off mail delivery for the group as I have more than enough mailing lists
> subscriptions to last a lifetime.

I've done just that.

Note to all, please repeat the CC to
shirish शिरीष <shirishag75 at gmail.com> 
in further followups.

> Ok, now the thing is Debian sid has just started on the road to KDE SC
> 4.7 . While I'm not a KDE User I do use quite a few of the KDE tools and
> more specifically games esp. Kshinshen and palapeli.
> 
> In most GNU/Linux distributions that I have played with there is a
> concept called changelogs where one can read what changes, new
> features,bug-fixes etc. were done to a program once a new version is
> out.

I guess 4.7 isn't as far behind as it could be, but FWIW, I just rebooted 
into the latest git kernel and the fresh kde 4.8.1, here, after just 
completing an update here on Gentoo ~amd64 with various pre-main-tree 
testing overlays and package unmasks... I was running the 4.8 betas and 
rcs well before the turn of the year, and 4.7 thus sounds /so/ "last 
year" to me. But of course I'm not you, and don't make the choices for 
your system.  It's all good!  =:^)

As to your changelog question... just what level of detail are you 
after?   There's several change-following options at differing levels of 
detail available, tho as you noted, none of them correspond exactly to 
the traditional changelog.

At the low detail end, each kde-sc release has an announcement that 
focuses on some of the major changes/improvements, tho it covers the 
whole kde release so doesn't cover all modules/subprojects let alone all 
changes to each.  These announcements are on the main kde.org site and 
are covered by the dot2.kde.org kde news site and its feeds, if you're 
interested in subscribing.  There's generally one bugfix update (4.x.y) a 
month, with a feature release (4.x) twice a year.  Additionally, "the 
dot" covers kde developer sprints and the commit-digests (see below), so 
it's generally an article or two a week, not too difficult to keep up 
with.  Also, FLOSS community news sites such as lxer.com and h-online.com 
keep up with kde news announcements, if you'd prefer to follow them.

At the high detail end, there's the version-control-system (most of kde 
is now on git, but some modules remain on svn/subversion, AFAIK) commit 
logs.  These describe each change, and of course there's the actual 
source code changes that were committed as well, if you're curious or 
want to revert/cherrypick individual commits.  You can either use the web 
frontend to view these commits, or follow the repositories directly using 
git/svn/whatever.  I do the latter myself for a number of packages, 
either thru gentoo's live ebuilds or directly, for instance, following 
the mainstream linus-kernel git directly.  Tho I don't follow kde's live 
repos routinely, I will do direct git access when tracking down a 
particular bug using git-bisect, etc, and report bugs bisected to a 
specific commit for the kernel and a few other packages I track closely 
routinely, and for kde occasionally.

In between these, there's the more or less weekly kde commit-digests 
series, as covered on dot2.kde.org and elsewhere.  These have a fairly 
high level summary, followed by a stats section and then the individual 
commit listings for the week.

There's also PlanetKDE, which syndicates all the kde people blogs, 
developers, artists, translators, infrastructure, PR, even distro 
packagers, pretty much anyone involved with the kde project at some level 
or another, that has a blog.  Following this is a great way to get to 
know more about the folks behind kde, as well as their kde projects, and 
to get a rather less technical viewpoint of what they're working on than 
the commit-digests and commit logs themselves give.

There's also the individual developer blogs.  If you're only using a few 
kde apps, not the entire desktop, using planetKDE to find the blogs of 
the devs for the packages you're interested in, then subscribing to those 
blog feeds directly, instead of to kdeplanet itself or the dot or 
whatever, is one of the more viable options.

Finally, most individual kde projects have their own home pages, but 
these tend toward general project information more than changelogs or the 
like.

Of all these, I'd suggest the individual developer blogs, probably 
initially found via kdeplanet, are going to be one of the closer matches, 
more practical to follow than the entire kdeplanet or commit-digests if 
you're only interested in a few kde subprojects/modules/packages, but 
with rather more individual package/module details than the general 
release announcements.

Links in no particular order:

http://dot2.kde.org/

http://www.planetkde.org/

http://www.kde.org/

http://www.kde.org/community/

http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute#News_and_Mail_Sources

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Sources

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.