Yet another failed KDE release?

Sat Mar 23 11:40:30 GMT 2013

dE . posted on Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:25:42 +0530 as excerpted:

>> > The moment you open upgraded the KDE desktop you see bugs.
>>
>> Not here, on the contrary, KDE has become more stable and polished with
>> every release.
>>
>> How about joining the testing team and help with testing before the
>> release instead of just calling people names afterwards? If you want
>> Free Software to get better you can contribute yourself, but please do
>> it in a more constructive way.
>>
> I'm running on Gentoo, and I've to build the 9999 release for the
> purpose, which almost never works, and then reverting back becomes very
> difficult.

(As another gentooer...) Not really.  No need for the live-9999 unless 
you really want it, and that's not what Myriam was referring to.

What Myriam was suggesting (I know because I saw the same testing-team 
invitation in the 4.10-pre-release announcements as well, with similar 
but a bit more detailed wording) was to run the kde pre-release betas and 
release-candidates and if desired, participate in the more organized pre-
release testing program kde's doing now with them.

While the stable bugfix updates appear on a monthly cycle (with feature 
release updates on a semi-annual cycle), the pre-releases appear on a 
condensed two-week cycle, with 4-5 pre-releases before the 4.y.0 feature 
release.

Beta1 aka 4.x.80 (so the upcoming 4.11 pre-releases will start with beta1 
as 4.10.80) typically appears a week after hard-feature-freeze, with 
4.11's hard-feature-freeze scheduled for June 5, 2013 and beta1 (aka 
4.10.80 tagging and release a week later on Wednesday, June 12.

4.11 beta2 aka 4.10.90 is scheduled two weeks later, Wednesday, June 26.

4.11 rc1 aka 4.10.95 is due after the hard API/Message/Artwork/Bindings 
and Docs freeze (July 8), with tagging and release scheduled for 
Wednesday July 10, two weeks after beta2.

4.11 rc2 aka 4.10.97 is due two weeks later, on Wednesday July 24, with 
the final 4.11.0 feature release currently scheduled, assuming everything 
goes well up to then, for Wednesday Aug 7.

However, it's worth noting that for 4.10 some blocker bugs were 
discovered during testing, and a third rc was added, delaying 4.10.0 a 
couple extra weeks to ensure a smoother general release.

KDE's schedules and feature plans are released publicly (with the caveat 
that they're tentative and subject to change), BTW, with links to the 
schedules/plans for each feature release found on kde techbase, here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules

The testing-team invitation I mentioned above appeared with the 
announcement for 4.10-rc1 (I just checked the beta announcements and 
didn't see it there), which can be found here (see the testing and 
getting involved sections):

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.10-rc1.php

Quoting:

KDE is running an extra detailed beta-testing program throughout the 4.10 
beta and RC releases. [...]   Beta Testing Program is structured so that 
any KDE user can give back to KDE, regardless of their skill level. If 
you want to be part of this quality improvement program, please contact 
the Team on the IRC channel #kde-quality on freenode.net. The Team 
Leaders want to know ahead of time who is involved in order to coordinate 
all of the testing activities. They are also committed to having this 
project be fun and rewarding. After checking in, you can install the beta 
through your distribution package manager. The KDE Community wiki has 
instructions. This page will be updated as beta packages for other 
distributions become available. With the beta installed, you can proceed 
with testing. Please contact the Team on IRC #kde-quality if you need 
help getting started.

There's a link to the mentioned wiki as well as distro-specific testing 
instructions.  For gentoo, the gentoo/kde project overlay, the same place 
you'll find the 9999-live-build versions, carries the pre-releases.

I started running the pre-releases with the 4.7 rcs and have run them all 
since, tho I choose not to run the live-versions.  That's why I know so 
much about them.  However, I don't do IRC and didn't do the special 
testing program; I've just run the betas, filing a couple bugs as I found 
them, but most of the ones I've found have been gentoo/kde project 
packaging bugs (generally minor dependency issues since I run a much 
leaner kde desktop than most, USE-flag and installed-package wise), not 
upstream kde bugs per se, so I've reported them to gentoo (tho there was 
one upstream bug I filed for the 4.7 rcs, I think, that was fixed, but I 
believe it was 4.7.1 before the fix was applied to the kde upstream 
sources).

Along about rc1 time the branch also splits off, and gentoo maintains 
branch-live builds as 4.x.49.9999 as well.  These should be MUCH more 
stable than the trunk-live builds, since they appear only after the 
feature and I /think/ after the API/bindings/string freeze.  In fact, 
after the general 4.x.0 feature release, these should contain only the 
fixes that will ultimately appear in the stable updates, except those 
running live-branch will get them first (assuming they rebuild their kde 
live-branch packages more frequently than the monthly stable release 
cycle, anyway).

While I'm not ready for trunk-live, I already run the pre-releases, and 
have seriously considered switching to branch-live.  However, while I 
have git installed and most of kde has switched to git, I don't have svn 
installed, and a few packages (less every release) remain on svn.  And I 
remember the svn deps as rather more complex than I really want to deal 
with, so I decided not to switch to kde-branch-live until the bits of kde 
I actually install, mainly core-desktop, with much of the artwork and 
many of the games, was all on git.  Last I looked, mid-4.9 (before the 
4.10 pre-releases hit IIRC) some of my installed kde packages were still 
svn based, so I didn't switch.  But with 4.10 I think some switched, and 
I believe others are switching for 4.11, so I'll probably investigate 
again and I may well switch to the 4.11.49.9999 live-branch builds when 
they come out.

What I'm really looking forward to in terms of a good challenge, however, 
is the kde5 frameworks betas, on qt5, but that's still a ways out AFAIK.  
And the kde/wayland betas, giving me some real skin in the wayland game 
instead of just reading about it here and there, but I believe that's out 
even further...  But 2014/2015 could be interesting indeed!

-- 
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

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