Observations and personal conclusions on the KDE release process since 4.0

[Simon Edwards]

Hello,

On 06/29/2010 09:52 PM, Wulf C. Krueger wrote:
> 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).

Thanks for the input, and the summary.

After the 4.4 release cycle which don't go so great, we tightened up the 
freeze schedule somewhat with regard to no-commits before tagging, 
clearer dependency freezes and better communication when changes to 
header files are done (i.e. mail kde-bindings@). So far my impression is 
that the release cycle which we are in right now has been running much 
smoother than in the past. I'm saying that with my bindings hat on. From 
my point of view there have been less last minute surprises.

The main issues for this cycle, IMHO, have been:

* unclear dependency requirements - i.e. exactly which versions of 
things are required by KDE. This info doesn't seem to be collected in 
one place. The problem is actually getting worse since KDE has more 
dependencies than in the past, and because components/subprojects have 
been migrating out of svn to git elsewhere.

* branches - Things being branched off earlier than expected, or work 
branches being merged later in the process make it harder to keep track 
of what exactly is going to be in 4.5.

I guess there is still work to do.

cheers,

-- 
Simon Edwards             | KDE-NL, Guidance tools, Guarddog Firewall
simon at simonzone.com       | http://www.simonzone.com/software/
Nijmegen, The Netherlands | "ZooTV? You made the right choice."