More Plasma bug fix releases

[Eric Hameleers]

On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, Albert Astals Cid wrote:

> El Tuesday 27 October 2015, a les 14:39:15, Eric Hameleers va escriure:
>> On Tue, 27 Oct 2015, 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.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>>  Albert
>>
>> You developers are so funny, my false teeth fell out from shaking.
>
> I did a serious reply to your comment and all i got back was sarcasm, please
> let's try to be constructive, otherwise what's the point of having this
> discussions?
>
> Do you really think we commit things that are not bugfixes to stable branches?
>
> Can you name some "meh stuff" that was commited to a stable branch and in your
> opinion should have waited for the next major release?

Says the master of sarcasm. I was being constructive. Please put on 
your release management hat.

But you are indeed correct, I should adjust one of my statements, by 
s/major/minor/ ; patches should not have to wait for the next 
*major* release.

However, I id not interpret your reply as anywhere near serious. If 
your view of distro packaging is that the packager should follow the 
git commits from day to day, minute to minute then you need to adjust 
your view of distro development. It is OK for *developers* to sit on 
top of the git commits since that is what they do. A packager on the 
other hand needs proper releases, because that makes the 
user's experience of the distro deterministic and will add the 
developer in triaging the bug reports because he knows what source 
went into the distro. If the developer wants to push critical 
patches downstream, then the developer still wants deterministic 
behaviour from the binaries produced by the distros and therefore a 
proper patch-release management is crucial.

Cheers, Eric

-- 
Eric Hameleers <alien at slackware.com>
Home: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/