Release Candidate 2 and regressions

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Martin,

On Monday, January 02, 2012 10:29:54 Martin Koller wrote:
> Please let the developers take some additional time to fix the most
> annoying regressions before releasing.

That only helps and works if the developers / maintainers in question are 
actually working on it. We won't delay the release until someone finds the 
time to fix a bug, that just doesn't scale.

> Probably you could motivate the developers for a "bug fixing week" before
> the tagging or some other way of QA.

That's honestly too much for the release team. This has to be taken up within 
the teams. The release team doesn't take responsibility for code quality, the 
maintainers do. If they don't, their software will look bad. Nothing the 
release team can really do about it.

> I'm a professional software developer since > 20 years, and I would never
> release software in such a state.

We'll have to balance here: does having regressions in non-standard components 
or settings justify not releasing thousands of bugfixes? It's not like not 
releasing actually helps, the opposite is true, by not releasing, we're 
holding back many fixes that are important, and punishing developers who did 
commit everything in time and made sure it works. That's a balance we need to 
strike.

> Again: this is no rant! I'm just looking for damage limitation as I love
> KDE and I'd like to be able to recommend KDE to other people as well.
> 
> The details (regressions) I found in the last 3 days:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290375
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290373
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290371

All KHTML bugs, none of which looks like a release blocker.

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290274 (very serious!)

I don't know if the KHTML team actually has the resources to fix these bugs, 
but given that most people use the WebKit part anyway, I wouldn't block a 
release. We *could* recommend switching to WebKit, or make this the default 
engine in Konqueror, but best is probably to talk to the KHTML guys about 
this.

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290331

Seems like a pretty annoying bug.

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290324

Not reproducable here.

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290278 (probably already fixed)

Let's trust Peter here :)

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290276

Visual glitch, not a release blocker either.

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290273

Not default, no release blocker.

> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261325 (new problem added)

Should be a separate report, the one in this bugreport is fixed, if there's a 
new problem, it doesn't make sense to recycle an old bugreport.

The new problem (kmix popup's slider always vertical) doesn't seem bad enough 
to warrant delaying a release.

I've added "not a release blocker" to some bugs above, this doesn't mean 
"don't care", it just means that the regression is not serious enough to 
warrant blocking the release. I wouldn't do that lightly, especially not if 
it's unclear if the maintainer is actually on this bug, or if it's just 
waiting in the queue until the day arrives.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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