Krita 3.0.1 Release Process

[Dmitry Kazakov]

> > It seems like our current release process got failed again. The
> translators
> > were not notified that the merge window got closed and they can start
> doing
> > translations.
>
> I think the translators were notified: we had a mail to the mailing list
> saying
>
> "Subject: Krita Planning: String freeze and bugfix phase going from
> August 08,  2016 at 12:00PM till September 04, 2016 at 12:00PM"
>


That was a Krita mailing list, not the translators one. And what I
understood from the Alexander, there is no understanding what they should
do.



> > What is more, noone even started merging 'stable'
> > translations into 'trunk', which means they cannot even start
> translations,
> > because 'stable' still points to 'krita/3.0' which is abandoned.
>
> See Luigi's last mail in the "Subject: Re: Translation now set up for
> "krita/3.0" branch" thread, which clearly meant, at least for me, that
> I did not have to do anything. If things are not working correctly,
> it's the translation community that should take action now.
>

1) What people mean and what you think people mean is not always the same,
and you should know that.
2) Even if translators forget/have no time for that, the users will come
and tell *us* bad words, not to the translators. So this is our business to
make the translators do the work.




> In any case:
>
> > https://trello.com/b/qwJf tools do not fix process probleZRdf
> <https://trello.com/b/qwJfZRdf>
>
> I will not use this. Sorry, but you've wasted your time on it. I cannot
> handle another way for people to make todo lists for me. I demand of
> our translators that they are pro-active, subscribed to this mailing
> list and capable of understanding that "string freeze" means "we can
> start translating" and that if there is a problem with the setup that
> they fix it ASAP or contact the right people to fix it.
>

Boud, are you asking a couple of hundred men read the a hundred of KDE
mailing lists and then waste time on manual investigation of what exact
steps should be done to translate this particular project? That will never
work! People need exact steps of what should be done. And if you
can't/don't want to write these steps, you need to delegate this process to
someone. And when you delegate something to someone, you should keep track
of the progress of it. Especially in opensource environment: people can
easily forget about it or have more priority personal tasks. Boud, you are
the maintainer of the project, and that is your main duty to organize
people around you! And I should say you are quite a good project/community
manager. But you are trying to keep track of all the tasks in your head,
and it doesn't work. Delegate things!



> I will NOT start using another tool -- tools do not fix process problems.
>

That is the problem! We have *NO* process. There are no responsibilities
for the tasks that need to be done before the release. Some time ago we
agreed on the checklist for the release [0]. Where is it? Why hasn't it
been done during this cycle? When discussing this topic on hangouts I
understood that you and Wolthera were going to implement the thing in
google-docs. Why hasn't it been implemented and the translators were not
notified?

The Trello board I propose is not just a tool. I allows us to write down
the new process in a step-by-step way so everyone can view and read it.
Right now all the steps are in your head, so noone can see what happens,
what help is needed. Every time we want to ask something about the release,
e.g. when the beta-builds will be ready we should ask you. Do you really
like it when a dozen of people keep asking you trivial questions instead of
just looking into the release board? Btw, how many alpha builds you already
done? How can I know without asking you?

And the thing that even more important, you just cannot handle all the
tasks yourself. You say you already released two alpha builds, but did you
change the versions of them in CMakeLists.txt, did you add a git tag for
that? How should we know what build the user reports bugs against? These
tasks like creating tags and upping the version can be easily delegated.
Everyone with commit access can do that.

And again, I'm not blaming you or Wolthera for not doing these tasks. I
just want you to delegate most of them! And delegation is not possible
without the process managed *SOMEWHERE*. Current google-calendar thing just
doesn't work, you cannot assign a task and keep track of its progress.



> I will also NOT go into panic mode -- this is the first time we try the
> new release cycle idea, for f's sake, why go into an all-out panic if
> people
>

Because it is not the first time when the release process goes to hell
because of not being managed. We had absolutely the same problem with 3.0.



[0] -
https://community.kde.org/Krita/Release/Checklist_Krita_Release_Checklist


-- 
Dmitry Kazakov
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