Fwd: KDE Frameworks Release Cycle

[Sune Vuorela]

On Tuesday 29 April 2014 23:20:21 Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
> The result will be that we will need to freeze at some point and do our best
> to keep up with patches for stable releases. Or maybe even drop KF5 for
> stable releases :-/

While I don't share the fatalistic point of Lisandro, I do agree that it 
brings potential problems. I do also expect a Debian to ship with a very 
patched-up set of KF5 packages. 

At freeze/stabilization point in at least Debian it is a time of 'bugfixes 
only, no new dependencies and features'. For a large collection of software on 
many architectures, a longer stabilization period is needed. 

Especially with all the KF5 bits is versioned bound to each others (so that to 
fix a bug in one component, you need to update *everything* - and all these 
bits of *everything* might have newer requirements of 'external libraries' and 
... oh the fun) it makes it often a simpler choice to just find the relevant 
patches and try to backport them, rather than pushing a entire new feature 
version (or maybe even 3 or 4 version numbers forward) and cross fingers that 
there are no regressions and none of the features introduces new grave bugs. 
(I know regressions and bugs never are planned, but my experience with 
software in general tells me that they happen. frequently.)

I do think we need a stable branch, and a stability period, and that it would 
make the primary customers (the distributions and their users) able to ship a 
better product closer to what we as KDE upstream thinks our product should be.

I do think that we are failing if we are putting the task of backporting 
patches on the shoulders of people who doesn't know the involved code in 
details.

Or, to put it another way, I don't think we can (or should) force users of KF5 
to choose to do their products in a rolling release model. 

So quite many users will end up using patched-up versions of KF5. That should 
not be our goal.

/Sune
-- 
I didn’t stop pretending when I became an adult, it’s just that when I was a 
kid I was pretending that I fit into the rules and structures of this world. 
And now that I’m an adult, I pretend that those rules and structures exist.
   - zefrank