Release Strategy Proposal

[Scott Kitterman]

On Saturday, April 27, 2013 12:27:49 AM Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday, April 26, 2013 18:15:03 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > impression is that your goal is to get more people working on KFS/PW2 and
> > your chosen method to achieve it is by enforcing a stop on feature work in
> > KDE4 platform/workspace.
> 
> this isn't our goal. our goal is to allow those of us currently working on
> workspaces to focus feature development where it already is: the Qt5 / KF5
> ports of Plasma (you can see the work in the plasma-framework repository)
> and kde-workspace.
> 
> we simply can't do both 4.x and 5.x feature development, for both technical
> and man-power reasons. we also don't want to let the 4.x releases of kde-
> workspace happen without any visible changes (have fun writing those release
> notes :) without some communication behind it, and we also understand there
> is a desire from at least some of our downstreams to have a long-term
> release they can focus on. so this represents a potential win-win situation
> in which we can communicate our shift of focus while also delivering a
> long-term release.
> 
> at the same time, we don't want to put pressure on application developers to
> shift focus away from 4.x. until KF5 is ready, there is no reason to do
> this.
> 
> we feel that stating clearly that workspaces is feature frozen covers all
> the above concerns.
> 
> if this also causes other people to join our efforts .. that would be a
> bonus. it is not the primary goal, however.
> 
> > Avoiding a long period of feature freeze between with KDE4
> > platform/workspace development stops and when KFS/PW2 is usable and
> > available is an important part of the story.
> 
> does it matter if the applications keep releasing? has anyone noticed this
> is already the case for a year in kdelibs?

It matters less that workspace is frozen if applications aren't, but unlike 
kdelibs, users see the workspace.  I just upgraded my main laptop to 4.10.2 
and I appreciate the changes in both (4.10 continues the trend of every 
release starting with 4.1 being a significant improvement over the rest).

I'm not opposed to the suggestion, only trying to suggest another way to look 
at things.  

Packaging KFS in all its component parts is going to be a lot of work.  If 
they can be incrementally released, that will not only bring in early 
adopters, but also spread out the packaging work over more time (we can mostly 
script updates, but initial packaging is labor intensive).  So I have two 
motivations for suggesting getting some stuff released soon.

Scott K