[Panel-devel] RFC: release management strategy

[Kevin Ottens]

Le mercredi 29 août 2007, Aaron J. Seigo a écrit :
> 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.

Sounds fair, you know that I'd like to see kdebase minimal anyway, providing 
the basic desktop features, so I'm clearly biased here.

> - 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.

Maybe it's better to keep them along the plasma libraries then? As a developer 
I like to find the examples with the code of the library I'm about to use 
(phonon and solid follow this pattern).

> - 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

w00t!

> - 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.

Hmmm, reminds me something... :-p

> 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

Looks fair.

> - 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 =)

I'm not sure about the 2 weeks thing, at this rate (and because of our current 
organisation where we definitely don't branch enough) you'll end up 
snapshoting non building or broken stuff.

Actually, the 1 month snapshot rate we discussed a while ago was my 
pessimistic view because of our current way of working. If we had a SCM that 
allows us to branch more (means cheap branching, fast switching, both way 
merges that don't kill the history) then push changes in the main when ready 
I'd push to two weeks even for KDE itself.

> 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.

With regular snapshots like this you probably want to be able to separate 
the "stable build", from the "snapshot builds" when the user retrieves the 
stuff. Does GHNS2 provide this kind of information? (I'm really clueless 
regarding GHNS2 features)

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

Right, any time during the day? or you envision a 24h meeting? ;-)

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."