More Plasma bug fix releases

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday, October 27, 2015 01:51:55 PM Martin Graesslin wrote:
> I was thinking about the problem of how we can get bug fixes quicker to our 
> user. With a three month release cycle a one-month bug fix cycle sounds too
> long to me.
> 
> So I thought we should make bug fix releases faster and more often. In 5.4
> we  already went for this partially by having the first bug fix earlier. I
> wanted to know how much work this would mean for our distributions. If we
> ship out way more bug fix releases, would you be able to work with it?
> Would it block you? Would you have to skip releases? Or is it just pressing
> a button to run automatic scripts which upload your packages?
> 
> What had I been thinking about? I was thinking about a Fibonacci based
> release  schedule. This gives us quick bug fix releases directly after the
> release with slowly larger intervals. Of course it would mean tag and
> release happens on same day.
> 
> So a hypothetical release schedule for Plasma 5.5 could look like:
> * 2015-12-08: 5.5.0
> * 2015-12-15: 5.5.1
> * 2015-12-22: 5.5.2
> * 2016-01-05: 5.5.3
> * 2016-01-26: 5.5.4
> (* 2016-03-01: 5.5.5)
> 
> Opinions?

What I'd really like to see (in extension to Martin's proposal) is that 
distros actually ship our updates. *That* would make it really high impact. If 
we do a 5.5.42, but distros keep the patch-level version, it's pretty useless 
to the vast majority of users. If distros would actually ship our patch-level 
releases reliably, that'd all be much more worthwhile.

What's really bothering me is the terrible long time it takes us to ship 
updates to users, more often than not, that time is expressed in months, not 
weeks, due to the update policies.

That said, if it has a positive impact and will actually be used, I'd like 
more frequent stable updates as well.
-- 
sebas

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