Better testing of tagged tars

[Pierre Schmitz]

Am 05.02.2013 20:42, schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> El Dilluns, 4 de febrer de 2013, a les 21:26:31, Andrea Scarpino va escriure:
>> We'd like to know if we can put the packages in a repository not enabled,
>> neither available, at install time. The instructions on how to enable this
>> repo are in a dedicated thread in the official forum and/or in the official
>> wiki. Oh, and in the KDE wiki page "how to install betas" as well.
> 
> To me that looks too widely available.
> 
> People will read random wikis, do random things and then you end up with them 
> reporting bugs about packages that don't really exist yet.

This has been an issue for a long time. It is good to have the packages
tested before release but the requirement to keep these private till the
official release makes it hard for distributions. Our vcs and package
distribution system is public and open by design. Trying to restrict
this just for KDE would be hard and wont happen. Right now this means
the pre-releases are only tested by the packager himself.

I see several solutions here:
1) We spin our own tars right from the git repos.
2) We don't start packaging before the official release
3) Release the new tars in public but don't announce them yet. If there
are issues, don't retag but release a point update; e.g. 4.1.0.1 etc..
Once the major build errors have been ironed out after a few days,
announce the final release. We may remove old broken tars then, but
please let's keep real git tags. And also never alter a tagged release.

I don't wanted to sound too aggressive here, but right now the
pre-releases are not widely tested and we would all benefit if we can
improve that situation.

Greetings,

Pierre

-- 
Pierre Schmitz, https://pierre-schmitz.com