Observations and personal conclusions on the KDE release process since 4.0

[Tom Albers]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:52:00 +0200, "Wulf C. Krueger"
<philantrop at exherbo.org> wrote:
> Hello! 
> 
> Please don't take any of the following personally - it's not meant to
> offend  
> 
> anyone.  

Hi, 

Thanks for the overview, it was a nice read. While you have valid points,
some are not. The biggest problem you seem to have is with announcing
untested tarballs. You have to understand that we are announcing them to
the packagers. They help to find problems with the tarballs. That's
perfectly fine.

If they have a problem and don't want to run into the chance of starting
from scratch, they can wait untill we officially announce the tarballs. At
that point the tarballs are ready and with help of the distro's that do
have tried to build it, we know for a fact that it will build on almost
every machine.

The option to prevent this is, as you suggested, to first build everything
our self. Then pass it to the packagers so they can prepare packages, then
announce it. That will set us back a week in every release. This is not
possible as in that case there would for example be a week between release
and the next tagging, which gives no time to incorporate bugs from a
previous release. QA-wise even worse. 

Last point I would like to comment about is your statement that an
increase in minor releases says something about the quality. That's untrue,
the minor releases are time based (released at the first Wednesday of the
month iirc) and or not based on the amount of bugs solved at all.

Again thanks for the overview, I'm sure I'll scan through it again when
making the next round of schedules and see if we can improve some items.
-- 
Tom Albers
KDE Developer