reflecting on 4.10

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Friday 11 January 2013 15:20:42 Weng Xuetian wrote:
> On Friday 11 January 2013 17:26:39，Marco Martin :
> > On Friday 11 January 2013, Marco Martin wrote:
> > > On Thursday 10 January 2013, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > > hello.
> > > > 
> > > > we're nearly at the point of releasing 4.10. with this development
> > > > cycle
> > > > very fresh in mind, it is a reasonble time to reflect on how it went.
> > > > this thread can be a place for us to do so, if we so wish. and i hope
> > > > we
> > > > do so that we can improve our processes in the future.
> > > > 
> > > > so how do you think 4.10 went?
> > > 
> > > mixed feelings: we did a lot, but definitely as already noted the
> > > process
> > > wasn't managed so well and the qa was not at the top (putting also
> > > myself
> > > in the blame list for that, is something that each of us shares a bit)
> > 
> > thinking more about it...
> > maybe what we actually need is someone with a wide enough knowledge of the
> > codebase, that continuously uses master and tests, poking people when
> > regressions happen? (especially in areas far from what one usually works
> > in, since for own area "proximity blindness" can happen) this kindof
> > happens already, but there isn't anythng "formal "about it
> 
> Maybe the solution is to have extra milestone, do extra alpha/beta, let
> distribution handle the testing work. That would be much more helpful for
> doing it from KDE side.
kubuntu project-neon? I can hardly imagine an easier way to test it. Granted, 
not everyone is using Kubuntu, but I do think that other distros could do 
similar (not looking into a particular direction, but there's a Geeko on my 
desk)
> 
> I guess another problem is, KDE devs are also KDE user themselves, which
> means unless they have extra machine for clean test, people will be much
> more lazy to test all changes since keeping two desktop environment and do
> all UI hard test is hardly impossible. Obviously, at least in KDE 4.10,
> people don't pull all changes all the time.
That's clearly a problem. I always think that I have a complete unique 
software stack. A random pull of kdelibs + a random pull of kde-workspace and 
git master + patches on KWin. It's very seldom that I actually pull in the 
latest changes, basically just when I need to restart the system.

Back in the days of early 4.x I did rebuild almost every day. To me it's a 
sign that our software got better, I don't have the need to rebuild just to 
get the latest bug fix and most components are so feature complete that I 
don't need the yet latest feature. It's then only if I see a blog post which 
motivates me to try out the latest version (as just happened with Marble).

Cheers
Martin
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