What to do and not do in third digit releases

[Sune Vuorela]

Hi

Some of you do probably not know me, while others do. I'm one of your friendly 
debian packagers. (Occasionally, I'm also one of your unfriendly debian 
packagers, but that's hopefully rare)

When looking at 4.1.2 which is tagged and about to be released, there is a new 
kind of change that we haven't earlier seen in the point releases. I don't 
remember seing any discussions about it, so I'm bringing it up here.

The third digit releases is as far as I know bugfix only releases.

But here in 4.1.2, there is major changes to kdegraphics, to be more precise 
the libkdcraw library which has been rewritten and breaking ABI and having a 
soname bump.

These changes are apparantly required for the upcoming digikam release (which 
might or might not be released before kde 4.2 gets released)

As this library isn't in kdelibs, but in kdegraphics, there isn't as such a 
policy against breaking binary compability in this module, but doing it in a 
third digit release might be something different.

So, I guess the release team should decide in between the following:

1) Branch is feature frozen, the changes should be reverted, but are welcome 
for kde 4.2 series.

2) Digikam is a so special app that it need a exception to usual policies for 
making it easier to do digikam (pre-)releases. 

3) Change the policies of third digit releases in general and allow many more 
new features in.

I personally would advocate 1. Let the new features and SONAME bump (and 
digikam) wait for kde4.2.

Getting a decision within the next days is quite important, as it is related 
to the kde4.1.2 release.

Thanks for your time

/Sune
-- 
How to ping to the POP clock?

You never have to connect the 2D front-end to a code and from Windows you 
either must doubleclick the BIOS, or must telnet to the tool on a GUI of the 
3D kernel on a analogic hardware in order to forward from a GUI.
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