KDE 4.1 planning

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Monday 07 January 2008 18:14:04 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Monday 07 January 2008, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > - Release 6-monthly, that would align us with downstream (distros)
> > - Release 9-monthly, that would align us with upstream (Qt at least, not
> > sure about X, and its relevance in this context)
>
> thing is that 4.4 will be out this quarter. if 4.1 was done in ~6 months
> and then we go to a 9 month cycle after that, we'll align pretty well with
> new Qt versions coming out a few months before KDE versions.

Yep, that way thing would fall into place neatly.

> > I'm slightly leaning towards 6 months, hoping that this would give us
> > back some traction with 'larger' distros which we seem to be losing
> > lately.
>
> lately? and it's because of a six month release cycle? 

Not sure about the root cause here, but Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu have 6 
months schedules. For them, it's an advantage to have a new desktop version 
every release. Having a 9 month schedule makes that align less neatly. For 
the distros, it's a plus to have a fresh upstream product to integrate every 
half year. They could even shift their schedule in a way that the desktop is 
both fresh enough and well-integrated as they need.
Of course, those reasons apply in pretty much the same way if we s/distros/KDE 
and s/KDE/Qt.

> note that no matter 
> which 6 month release cycle we pick there will be N-(N-1) distros that we
> don't align with perfectly, where N is the number of interesting distros
> since pretty well none of them follow the same release timing afaik.

That's actually surprisingly not true :-)

openSUSE 11: May - July (no exact date known yet)    
Fedora 9:    29 April 2008
Ubuntu 8.04: April 2008

So it is possible to 'somewhat' align with most major distros.

Simplified, 6 months means we choose downstream to align to, 9 months means we 
choose upstream. The more exciting /me leans towards 9 months, the 'let's 
keep our distribution channels in mind'-sebas prefers 6.

Note that I deem it *much* more important to settle down to a release schedule 
and stick for that than wether it should be 6 or 9 months. 
-- 
sebas

 http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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