More Plasma bug fix releases

[Heinz Wiesinger]

On Tuesday 27 October 2015 22:34:06 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Tuesday 27 October 2015, a les 14:18:01, Eric Hameleers va escriure:
> > On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, October 27, 2015 06:25:42 AM Eric Hameleers wrote:
> > >> I like the idea of getting more visibility for bugfixes that will give
> > >> the enduser a better Plasma experience. Ideal for me would be a patch
> > >> tracker (not the same as a bug tracker) where intermediate patches are
> > >> made available that are scheduled for inclusion in the next release.
> > >> That allows me as a package builder to assimilate those patches if I
> > >> think they can not wait until the next release.
> > > 
> > > That sounds like you just want the latest stable git branch, in this
> > > example Plasma/5.5?
> > 
> > No, of course not. I consider the git branch to be in eternal flux.
> > The git HEAD may contain valuable usability patches but also other meh
> > stuff that can wait until the next major release. I do not want to dig
> > through hashes and commits to find out whether you solved some
> > blocking issue.
> > A patch tracker, containing patches you (the developers) consider
> > critical and which should find their way to the user ASAP, that is a
> > place where I would look.
> 
> Yes, of course yes.
> 
> Every single patch commited to a stable branch is a bugfix and thus the
> developer considers critical and should be released as soon as possible to
> users, otherwise instead of to the stable branch the developer would
> commited the patch to the development branch.

I guess this is one of the core issues we need to address somehow. What's 
considered "critical" differs between developers and packagers, even between 
packagers of different distributions. What Eric would like is a way to find 
really critical fixes that can't wait until the next point release. But again, 
what he considers critical might be something completely different from what a 
developer considers critical.

In the end, whether those fixes are provided as patches or patch releases 
probably won't change much on the packager side. The core question is always 
"do I consider the changes critical enough to spend time on it". *This* is the 
problem that afaiu you want to solve.

So I suppose it's less about the amount of releases, but more getting to a 
common understanding (on both sides) of what "critical" entails. What are the 
expectations of developers what should happen on the distribution side with 
"critical" fixes, and what are the expectations of packagers on what to 
consider "critical".

Grs,
Heinz
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