Plasma 5.8 and openSUSE 42.2

[Antonio Larrosa]

Hello,

(It seems the previous attempt to send this email got stuck at the
mailing list moderator queue, so I'll try again)

As you know, a few weeks ago openSUSE kde packagers were delighted to
know that Plasma 5.8 would be a LTS release. Let me begin by saying
that's really important for us that Plasma has a LTS release (and I
don't know if I'm saying that with my KDE hat or my SUSE hat, since I
think it benefits both projects), so in any case, thanks a lot for that
decision.

As you probably know, openSUSE has two distributions, openSUSE
Tumbleweed which is a rolling release distribution and openSUSE Leap, a
stable distribution based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise codebase, which
mostly gets bugfix updates and not major version changes (it could get
them, but we really try to discourage that whenever possible). With that
in mind, you can guess that it would benefit both KDE and openSUSE if we
included Plasma 5.8 in the next openSUSE Leap release, Leap 42.2 .

The problem comes when one looks at the schedules for Plasma and
openSUSE Leap releases:

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Roadmap

The main part of the current schedules is:

2016-08-25: openSUSE 42.2 Beta 1
2016-09-15: KDE 5.8 Repo Freeze
2016-09-21: openSUSE 42.2 Beta 2 - Package freeze
2016-09-29: KDE 5.7.95 LTS (5.8.0 Beta)
2016-10-06: openSUSE 42.2 RC1
2016-10-13: KDE 5.8.0 LTS Release
2016-10-18: openSUSE 42.2 RC2
first week of November 2016: openSUSE 42.2 Release

As you see, there's quite bad timing in there.
I've talked with Martin and Sebas as well as with Ludwig Nussel
(openSUSE's release manager) separately trying to move both schedules
around in a way that could make it possible to get 5.8.0 in openSUSE 42.2.

I have a proposal that I think (and hope) that will satisfy everyone so
I think it's time to move this forward to all involved parties. In that
sense, I wrote a very similar mail to the openSUSE kde packagers and
will send it at the same time than this one. I hope you like the
proposal and note that I've tried to keep in mind the needs of each
project (QtCon/Akademy dates and the desire to have a stable Plasma
release on one side, SUSECon/SLE12SP2/other dates and the desire to have
a stable openSUSE release on the other).

This mean bringing forward some kde release dates and postponing some
opensuse pre-releases to make everything fit tightly.

2016-09-01: openSUSE 42.2 Beta 1 (this would include the last Plasma
release available at that time, 5.7.4 or 5.7.5)
2016-09-08: Plasma 5.8 Repo Freeze (last day of Akademy, maybe that
could be moved to freeze the repo just before QtCon?)
2016-09-15: Plasma 5.7.95 LTS (aka 5.8.0 Beta)
2016-09-21: openSUSE 42.2 Beta 2 - Package freeze (with 5.7.95)
2016-09-29: Plasma 5.8.0 LTS Release
2016-10-06: openSUSE 42.2 RC1 (with Plasma 5.8.0)
2016-10-11: Plasma 5.8.1 LTS
2016-10-18: openSUSE 42.2 RC2 (most probably including Plasma 5.8.1 if
bugs found and depending on the size of changes)
2016-10-18: Plasma 5.8.2 LTS
2016-11-01: Plasma 5.8.3 LTS
First week of November 2016: openSUSE 42.2 Release

This would mean that openSUSE 42.2 would be released including 5.8.1 .
Also, it might be possible to shift the Leap schedule a bit more if we
find grave bugs, so if that's the case, it could even include a newer
version.

This would mean too that if the repo freeze is done just after Akademy,
then you would have one week instead of two between the repo freeze and
the 5.7.95 release. If the repo freeze could be done before Akademy,
then you actually would have more time.

So, my question is, would you agree with that? Anybody sees any problem
if both projects agree to those changes to their respective schedules?

Please, keep in mind that both projects have needs and requirements, but
it would be great to find one solution that benefits both of us and for
that, both projects have to give in a little.

Thanks,

-- 
Antonio Larrosa
alarrosa at suse.de
larrosa at kde.org