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

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Sonntag, 10. Juni 2012, 20:17:56 schrieb Wulf C. Krueger:
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> On 10.06.2012 15:27, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> >> - - Before announcing the tarballs, build the whole thing at
> >> least once.
> > 
> > We do that, that's why we have a week before the release where
> > packagers get access to pre-release tarballs.
> 
> No, that's for us packagers to "do our thing". What you give us
> should, as a rule, build and install properly.
> Of course, we'll notify you if things are broken but that should be
> the exception, not the rule.
> 
> Nor should offloading the burden of QA to us be the rule. You
> shouldn't just throw untested tarballs at our feet and hope for the best.

Hm. Somebody needs to be the first/one to test the tarballs. Who should that 
be? And what environment should she/he use?
And should all other packagers simply wait until a first packager has tried to 
create packages from the tarballs?

With regard to QA, all the tarballs are created from snapshots of the branches 
that the developers build from, all the time. So if there are problems they 
ideally would have already been found (and fixed) by the developers. Just that 
developers have usually not the exact build environment which there is for a 
package build, which is also different for each distribution.

Take the problems Rex today reported for kdesdk and Fedora as example. E.g. I 
build kdesdk once a week or so. Never saw his problem. And surely no other 
kdesdk developer has. Some things only turn up at packaging time, for a given 
distribution setup.

Please also remember that the size and complexity of the software released as 
KDE SC has become quite large compared to KDE3 times, so a few more issues at 
release times are to be expected. Surely still everyone would like 0 issues :)

For the dependencies on not-released versions, that is indeed something that 
is annoying, should not have happened and should have been catched before. But 
as I understood Allen & Co. are working on a system to improve in that area, 
right?

> Riiiight. It's all my perception only and KDE has no issues at all. ;-)

Nobody claims there are no issues. There are indeed quite a few. But it's 
simply nobody but us (and for me packagers are part of the KDE community, why 
else would they care for KDE software) who needs to fix them, as these are all 
our itches :)

Cheers
Friedrich