Fwd: Re: Fwd: KDE Frameworks Release Cycle

[Harald Sitter]

On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 1:33 AM, Michael Pyne <mpyne at kde.org> wrote:
>> Also ideally, we should break with this tendency of "upstream/downstream"
>> and you should become upstream, I would love to see opensuse (and others)
>> keeping the release you picked maintained in a branch.
>
> I think this is wishful thinking. I mean, it would be nice to have happen as
> well, but they can't all have that much extra manpower lying around with
> nothing to do. Work they do to act as a virtual upstream is work they can't do
> for their downstream duties, so you're asking them to stop doing something
> they're doing now to pick up for kde.org duties.
>
> They could just as fairly ask for us to start handing downstream packaging
> chores.

But it isn't extra work or different work. It is the work a distro
does anyway. As a distribution you pick a KDE platform release to use
in your next distro release and unless your support cycle perfectly
matches KDE's you then end up pushing patches to this version for your
distribution exclusively because there's not going to be another
official release of that platform version. Now how cool would it be if
people instead of doing these backports with a one-distribution scope,
would do it "upstream" for everyone to use. There's not much overhead,
in fact depending on the distribution policy on updates ther would be
none whatsoever (e.g. one would do a release "upstream" dubbed KDE SC
4.10.8, based on the maintenance branch maintained by yoloLinux,
yoloLinux then goes ahead and channels the new/changed tarballs
through their distribution specific update process).

HS