Observations and personal conclusions on the KDE release process since 4.0

[Stephan Kulow]

Am Dienstag 29 Juni 2010 schrieb Wulf C. Krueger:
> Having been a KDE packager for several years now, I've looked at the
>  releases of KDE since 4.0.0. I "felt" that the overall KDE release quality
>  has become noticeably worse than it was during the 3.x days (during which
>  I was most active).
> 

Hi Wulf,

Thanks for your effort to give a feedback on the status quo. I'm sure there
are points in your analysis to improve the process. But I can't get one thing
left uncommented: we _did_ rerelease KDE 3 tar balls a lot to the packagers
and most of the times, KDE3 _tar balls_ were untested too (developers update
their svn, recompile and if it worked, they assume it works good enough to 
create tar balls).

And KDE4 is not only much bigger, also e.g. the interest in working bindings 
is much higher. In KDE3 times, it was very often only noticed far after 
release and still not many cared. 

To not release ready tar balls to the packagers, means hours and hours that
are wasted with only one guy testing when many more could test at the same 
time. And hopefully it's clear to every packager, that prerelease tar balls
are prerelease. If not, your mail is a good start to clarify that :)

Greetings, Stephan