KDE 4.1 planning

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 07 January 2008, Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> Put me down as another vote for at least trying a 6 month release cycle,
> with 4.1 in June.

are we really counting january as the first month of 4.1 devel? shouldn't we 
try and let 4.0 dust settle and get people focussed on bug fixing and what 
not? esp if we announce the release sched and say "it's six months.. except 
we're nearly a month into it now, sorry you didn't know" i would expect some 
devs to be a little annoyed ;)

maybe i'm just being cautious but july sounds saner to me. note as well that 
akademy is in august so it will work out nicely to have a 4.1 out the door 
soon before that, in either case.

> Now that the big baby is out, we can attempt to pack 
> less changes into each release, but make them more frequent. If
> something is not ready by 4.1, then 4.2 is not that far away. Rinse,
> repeat. A 9 month interval for inclusion of new features and
> applications in the main release seems too long, at least for me.

it's actually a 7 month interval, not 9. it worked well in the 3.x and 2.x 
days. it's also useful to remember than not everyone starts developing on the 
first day. our contributors, for work or personal reasons, often start and 
stop throughout the devel cycle. if the calendar-time window is too small 
we'll miss fitting some (many, even) of the man-hour sets needed to complete 
a given set of features. 

which is to say that 7 months of man hours is a huge amount of time to work on 
feature if you work on an app every day and are doing the usual 
not-world-changing-overhaul type development; but we're talking about 7 
months of calendar time, not man hour time. a 4 or 5 month window is 
considerably smaller and as such risks putting features off for another 
release (and 2*6 is 12, which greater than 9 ;)

the fact that this pace worked really well for us in the 3.x days should not 
be discounted imho.

oh, and phonon: since Qt will be including phonon and it has a 9 month cycle, 
if we go to a 6 month cycle every 2nd or 3rd release (depending which way you 
look at it) we'll have mismatched phonon versions. it would be cool to avoid 
doing that if possible.

that said, i'd like to see a 6 month cycle for 4.1. it's after 4.1 that i'm in 
favour of a 9 month cycle.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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