Synchronized release schedule for Plasma

[Carl Schwan]

Le jeudi, janvier 7, 2021 12:28 PM, niccolo <niccolo at venerandi.com> a écrit :

> Hi,
> sorry to bring this up again, but I would be in favor of a switching to 2 releases every year. I'd like to add some reasons to do that on the promotional side:
> 1) In Promo, we are quite stepping up our game in the quality of announcements, to both the website and the release video. We are already a bit stretched out with time, and having more of that to prepare each release would benefit us, especially if we intend - and I think we do - to improve our work even further.

I don't agree. The problem is that we are always starting working on an announcement too late. If we were starting more early writing the announcement, it would be easier.

> 2) We have measured that doing less announcements every year usually gives those more engagement; we'd expect a good rise of that if we switch from 3 to 2 yearly.

This is the case for 'release service' announcements. Plasma announcements are getting more and more engagement. Also I'm not sure that having if we were to make 2 announcements instead of 3, the engagement would be more then 50% higher.

> 3) Finally, we also expect higher engagement if we have more big features to promote. In all the releases I've worked on, I always felt - yes, this is subjective - that the changes were not quite enough to make the user go "wow" (we are generally talking about 2/4 big features each release). Bringing that up by ~50% would help a lot.

The Plasma 5.21 announcements, I have been working on, is already big enough, so don't worry :) Large set of big features also means more chance of big regressions, big announcements to translate, ...

> 4) It is much easier to explain to the users that they are going to get the new features soon in an announcement, if major distributions such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu have the new release ready soon, rather than having to wait months to actually get them.

I'm not convinced but I might be biased since I believe full rolling distributions are the only way forward for most end users.

> I would also suggest switching to 6 months from a developer point of view, but here I'd prefer to only argue the benefit in the promotional side, adding up to the advantage of synced release frequency with distributions. It doesn't make much sense to be annoyed that your changes do not reach the users in time in a 6 months release cycle, when you currently have to wait about the same amount of time, changing every time, before that version gets picked up by major distributions with most users, as said before.

Cheers,
Carl

> Thanks,
> Niccolò
>
> p.s.: my mail could be arriving with a big delay and duplicated; if so, I'm sorry, I did some confusion with my different email addresses.
>
> From "Plasma-devel" plasma-devel-bounces at kde.org
> To "plasma-devel" plasma-devel at kde.org
> Cc kde-devel at kde.org
> Date Tue, 1 Dec 2020 16:01:29 +0000
> Subject Re: Synchronized release schedule for Plasma
>
> We discussed this in the Plasma meeting on Monday and I'm afraid there's little appetite in moving to a 6 monthly release or a 3 monthly release.  We did used to have a 3 monthly schedule but that is too tight given the length of beta and freezes we want to have now.  But also 6 monthly feels too long, for distros that miss the release that become a long time that we have users on an older release. 
>
> Having said that if there's occasions where we can shift a release a bit to help distros we're happy to do that.
>
> Jonathan