[Panel-devel] RFC: release management strategy

[Robert Knight]

> - we keep the set of items in kdebase/workspace/plasma *minimal*. these should
> be core functionality items only.

+1

> proposed irc meeting day: saturday sept 8th. please rsvp =)

I'll be there.  I have quite a lot of changes I made this week to
libs, the Plasma app and some applets in playground that need some
review and I made notes about various things that came up that need
discussion.  I couldn't commit anything this week because my internet
access was somewhat limited.  In summary I have layouts working in the
panel, and the tasks, clock and system tray applets modified to work
with them.

> we do a source only snapshot release of plasma itself for our more devoted
> testers one a month

Sounds good, but I think it would really help our cause if pre-built
packages via one or more build services were well publicised to expand
the number of testers.

Regards,
Robert.

On 29/08/2007, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> hi all..
>
> in the past kdesktop's plugins came from a few different places: libkonq for
> action menus (some c++, most .desktop files) and the dynamic wallpaper thing
> which pretty much didn't see any traction outside of kdebase/kdesktop itself
> and probably never had more than 3 or 4 plugins ever written for it.
>
> kicker's plugins were several and largely redundant with each other (menus,
> extensions and applets) all of which had their base classes hosted in
> kdelibs. yep, the support for one specific app's plugins were loaded by
> every
> single kde app. brilliant, no? ;)
>
> why am i rehashing that bit of kde history? well, it made the release
> strategy
> pretty simple:
>
> - ship a bunch of stuff in kdebase
> - shove a bunch more stuff in addons
> - let other applications ship their own applets, e.g. kate's session menus
> shipped with kate (though konsole's was in with kicker =)
>
> this seems a bit less than ideal, however. we also have the outstanding
> issue
> of what to do with all the items in playground/base/plasma/ .. personally, i
> am really liking how that is working. a lot.
>
> i've never really liked kdeaddons, either. so here's my proposal:
>
> - we keep the set of items in kdebase/workspace/plasma *minimal*. these
> should
> be core functionality items only. i'd like to have an irc meeting in 2 weeks
> time to settle on which those will be.
>
> - we create extragear/plasma/ with subdirs for dataengines/, runners/,
> applets/, plasmoids/, scriptengines/ and possibly animators/ (if any new
> ones
> appear =). people move their own work as they want into extragear/plasma/.
> plasmoids/ would house non-c++ packages. we will cover which items to move
> over now at that irc meeting.
>
> - we create a place for sample applets; perhaps in extragear as well? e.g.
> extragear/plasma/samples/ with all the subdirs under there? i don't want to
> lose all the samples; i think they are valuable and should be maintained.
> they shouldn't be installed, or shipped, by default but be there for
> documentary and educational purposes.
>
> - there will be *no* plasma stuff in kdeaddons. this could be seen as my
> desire to kill kdeaddons outright, which would be accurate. ;)
>
> then releases will happen like this:
>
> - everything gets released with each KDE release, extragear included
>
> - we do a source only snapshot release of plasma itself for our more devoted
> testers one a month. this is assuming KDE itself doesn't get into this game
> so we don't have to. but even if KDE as a whole doesn't do periodic
> snapshots, i want to for plasma. maybe plasma could serve as a test case
> here
> for the rest of KDE if need be
>
> - we do a snapshot release of extragear every 2 weeks, hopefully as proper
> releases including binaries for as many platforms as possible. we need to
> look into availability of services such as OpenSUSE's build system as i
> really don't want to set up and maintain a network of systems ourselves =)
>
> what this means is that we can get people trying out new addons all the time
> and keep the GHNS2 constantly repo fresh. it also means that kde releases
> are
> full of all the plasma goodies up to that point in time. hooray.
>
> as the plasmoid community grows post-4.0, i'll be heavily recruiting people
> to
> move their stuff in extragear/. this is yet another advantage over
> kdeaddons,
> imho.
>
> proposed irc meeting day: saturday sept 8th. please rsvp =)
>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
> humru othro a kohnu se
> GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
>
> KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
>