Future frameworks releases

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Tuesday 09 June 2015 16:58:43 Christian Mollekopf wrote:
> On Tuesday 09 June 2015 15:35:20 Heinz Wiesinger wrote:
> 
> > Do note that while a typical linux distribution does ship with an
> > abundance
> > of libraries that need to be handled differently, very seldomly those are
> > maintained by the same person, while KDE Frameworks in its current
> > packaging form can be handled by one person just fine.

I think the effort to do and package the releases is the key thing here. Heinz 
is very much right that you can do proper versioning and dependency tracking 
when there is a dedicated maintainer per library, but for a set of 70 
libraries released by the same person, this becomes very difficult from a 
practical point of view.

If we would have individual dedicated maintainers for each framework then it 
would be a different story, but we in fact have only very few maintainers for 
the amount of frameworks we release.

> Given the right scripting that continues to be possible and if you indeed
> think timestamps is the way to go for your distribution you are perfectly
> free to do just that.

It might be possible to solve a lot of this by some tooling, but this is quite 
some effort, and the effort is not only on the release side, but also on the 
packaging side and with any other consumers of the libraries.

For example for Inqlude I currently have a tool, which updates the meta data 
of all frameworks with each release. It only works because it can assume that 
the version numbers are the same for all libraries. With different version 
numbers I would have to implement some checking of available tarballs, parsing 
version numbers, etc. Doable but more complex and some effort.

In general I like the idea of having proper versions in frameworks which 
reflect what is actually happening in the frameworks, but unless we find a way 
how to get in the extra effort to make it happen, I would be very hesitant to 
argue for it.

Christian, how much of this effort are you willing to take over? Are there 
others who would help with that?

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>