Future frameworks releases

[Christian Mollekopf]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015, at 11:56 AM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yes, that is the reality we have to deal with. But so far the versioning
policy is
by design, and not as a workaround for a lack of manpower, at least that
is what
I gather from the responses. I think by design the libraries should be
versioned,
but for some (respectively the majority), we bump them automatically due
to 
lack of manpower.

> > 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.
> 

I don't know the script, but if it i.e. would just gather the latest
release tarballs,
then you could continue to ignore versions if the full set of tarballs
is made 
available somewhere.

> 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?
> 

Since Sandro Knauss and me both have a professional responsibility in
this realm,
and we would indeed also be able to take over some effort in that
responsibility.
We of course also have our hands full already (who doesn't ;-), but we
can certainly
help adjusting stuff that needs adjusting, and even potentially take
over
tasks that require a longer term commitment.

Cheers,
Christian