Proposal for branching policy towards KF5

[Michael Pyne]

On Fri, July 19, 2013 00:21:21 you wrote:
> After more live discussion with Sebas and Marco plus Aaron over a video
> chat, we came up with the following setup for the workspace repos (*) :
> 
> - the development branch for their next feature release (based on Qt5/KF5)
> will be "master".
> - *before* this happens, however, kdesrc-build / kde-build-metadata /
> projects.kde.org will need to be improved so that tools (kdesrc-build and
> possibly build.kde.org) can automatically select "the latest Qt4-based
> branch" (i.e. master everywhere and 4.11 for the workspace repos), on
> demand. This would also be the opportunity to implement "latest *stable*
> branch" which is 4.11 for most modules right now, but could be at some
> point 4.12 for most and 4.11 for workspace repos.
> Adding a similar generic selection for qt5/kf5, we would end up giving 3
> options to people who compile from sources: stable, latest-qt4, or qt5/kf5-
> based.

First note: There's a lot of different mailing lists with at least some 
interest in this discussion, so I've mailed them all for informational 
purposes... but let's keep the discussion limited to the kde-core-devel 
mailing list!

Back on topic, I have made an initial draft specification [1] for what this 
logical module group layer would look like.

In addition, there is a sample JSON file in the kde-build-metadata git 
repository, called "logical-module-structure" that one can view to get a feel 
for the proposed syntax/semantics.

I didn't want to write another parser, but JSON has no native comment support, 
so the documentation [1] is on community.kde.org (though perhaps that's for 
the best).

For those with no clue what I'm talking about, the original thread from kde-
core-devel is available from [2].

A point of concern is that currently we already have a concept similar to 
this, for i18n. It's possible to specify in the projects.kde.org management 
interface a "stable" or "trunk" branch for translation purposes. I don't know 
the translation infrastructure well enough to see how this proposal would 
impact that feature; I assume we'd want to move scripty (& friends) over to 
using this at some point if we go through with it, but it's probably easy 
enough to keep both techniques on whatever release checklist we're using now.

> At this point I think this still needs a green light from the release team,
> though.

They are now CC'ed for review.

One clarification I should make is that I also received a recommendation to 
investigate migrating our current dependency data into this new JSON file if 
possible. I put the effort into doing this as it would also help make the 
implementation of some kdesrc-build misfeatures relating to dependency-data 
additions a bit easier, as there's no need to construct an AST and a parser. 
Additionally it would permit 'soft' dependencies, which are useful for modules 
that can utilize optional features but don't have required dependencies on 
other git modules.

However that can, and probably should, be considered separately (though I'll 
take comments now, if you have them).

[1]: http://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/Project_Metadata
[2]: http://markmail.org/message/4l3yqerga7mfiit5

Anyways, thanks for your interest and please let me know if this will work to 
solve the problem at hand. If so I will start on integrating within kdesrc-
build, and working with the sysadmins to support within the continuous 
integration infrastructure.

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne
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