Fwd: Re: Fwd: KDE Frameworks Release Cycle

[Raymond Wooninck]

On Wednesday 30 April 2014 10:17:23 Sune Vuorela wrote:
> 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.

For openSUSE it will definitely bring problems as that we wouldn't be able to 
release any maintenance updates anymore for the KDE Desktop with this Release 
Cycle.  As Sune indicated, if KF5 is updated then the other components like 
Plasma-Next and the Applications needs to be rebuild. This is not the current 
setup of the openSUSE maintenance process, nor will this change just for KF5. 
This means that the only way for us is to start back-porting the bugfixes and 
release those as maintenance updates in order to provide a stable experience 
for our users. 

If the other components would select a similar Release Cycle, then this would 
mean that the non-rolling distro's have to focus on a constant back-porting of 
bug-fixes and we would not provide our users with newer functionality.  This 
would eliminate the main goal that this Release Cycle is targeting (To 
introduce new functionality gradually) as that the main distributions would 
skip several KF5 releases before a new distribution version is released to the 
users. 

Seeing it more black and white, then indeed distributions might want to make 
the choice whether or not to include the KDE Desktop in their stable 
distributions releases and to find another way to provide a different way for 
users to install it and having the rolling releases there.  But as indicated 
in other emails, is this really the experience we want to give to our users ? 

Regards

Raymond
openSUSE KDE Community Packaging Team
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