ALERT: KDElibs (at least) 4.8.4 is actually 4.8.80+

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday, June 9, 2012 13:10:40 Modestas Vainius wrote:
> > There's no mispackaging. If you followed the list or read the archives
> > before blaming people of wrong doing you'd know that kdelibs for 4.8.4 and
> > 4.8.80 actually come from the same branch.
> 
> Thank you for pushing a bunch of untested huge changes in the "minor" point
> release. Really appreciated.

there seems to be some general misunderstanding here as to how the kdelibs 4.8 
branch is being developed. let's see if we can clear that up:

the 4.8 branch is only seeing bug fixes. no features. no major changes.

all of that work is happening in the frameworks branch which will become 5.0. 
kdelibs 5.0 (aka Frameworks 5) will have releases before workspaces and apps. 
this is to ensure a nice, smooth and staged transition for our users and 
developers. libraries first, applications follow at a pace that works for the 
applications. (removing the "release everything or release nothing" catch-22 
we ran into with 4.0)

so what does this mean for the 4.8 branch? it is always stable as only bug 
fixes go into it. we can pull from it for any given release and it is the same 
kdelibs + whatever new bug fixes have been made since the last release.

it is no different than x.y.1 -> x.y.2 -> x.y.3 -> x.y.4

there are no large changes, nothing untested.

and we've worked hard to make it that way. there have been developers who have 
been unsatisfied that their new features needed to go into the frameworks 
branch rather than 4.8. but we need to keep 4.8 stable so we can focus on the 
5.0 release so it comes out both on time and with high quality.

iow, we've taken steps to make sure that we can do this responsibly and 
without endangering stability.


a small social comment: in future, when you come across something that seems 
daft to you or even just seems to lack explanation, try asking first instead of 
jumping to conclusions. if you ask and you were indeed correct, then everyone 
finds out about the problem and it gets fixed. if you ask and you are operating 
under a misconception, then there is no harm and we get to avoid the unhappy 
and negative back-and-forth emails over nothing.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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