RFC: Release Management Going Forward

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Sunday 17 July 2011, todd rme wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> > Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> >> Let me dump my brain and add how I see release management going forward
> >> from here:
> >> 
> >> = KDE SC 4.x =
> >> * monolithic tarballs, layout like 4.6.0 release
> >> * no disruption in packages
> >> * git migration should not have effect on released tarball layout to
> >> keep packagers' lives easy
> >> * optional split tarballs (split/ subdirectory?)
> > 
> > I would welcome this immensely, even if a bit late.
> > 
> > I know a couple distros (fedora, kubuntu at least) had serious complaints
> > about the the current tarball splitting, but have begrudingly been
> > putting in a lot of effort to adapt anyway for lack of repreive.
> > 
> > -- rex
> 
> On the other hand distros like Arch and openSUSE are already using
> split tarballs and have been for some time.  Going back would probably
> make things harder for them.  I am not sure about Fedora, but my
> impression is that Kubuntu has already pretty much finished the work
> doing the conversion.

Did you have a look at the superbuilds for KDE ?
Docs are here, mostly complete:
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/superbuild

It's still in the early phase, but it should work already.
With these superbuilds, you can create e.g. a standalone source package for 
all of e.g. kdegraphics. When creating such a source package, you can/have to 
enter the git tag e.g. via cmake-gui, then the source package will be for this 
tag.
Or, you can build all of kdegraphics in one go directly from git.

I plan to create such files for all of KDE, and maybe even one for complete 
KDE, with fine-grained dependencies.

With the switch to KDE frameworks some kind of help for building KDE will be 
absolutely necessary IMO, i.e. either the superbuilds or kdesrc-build.

IMO CMake superbuild has the advantage that it is not an additionally tool, 
and that it can create tagged standalone source packages.

It'd be nice if you could give it a try and let me know what you think.

Alex