More Plasma bug fix releases

[Eric Hameleers]

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, Martin Graesslin 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.
>
> Please never do that! You are risking the quality of the product. What you
> consider the "meh stuff" might be a very required patch to make the software
> work together with other patches.
>
> I also understood your request for a patch tracker in the same way as sebas
> and Albert and that you just need a better way to get the patches from git.
> Anything else is not realistic. If I do a commit to a stable branch of course
> it is a required bug fix and not some "meh stuff". We have policies and we
> keep to it.
>
>> 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.
>
> It doesn't work that way. Let's say I have this super critical bug fix done
> for 5.4.3, I mark that as critical in the patch tracker. Then you roll it out,
> what might happen:
> a) it doesn't even compile
> b) it breaks in horrible, horrible runtime ways
>
> Why? Because it build up on a "not so super critical bug fix" from the 5.4.2
> release which you did not include.
>
> This doesn't make sense. We will never be able to guarantee that this works.
> We have a stable release branch which gets CI tested. We don't have a random
> set of patches which gets CI tested. If we had that, well what would be the
> difference to the stable branch?
>
> Anyway: I would like to come back to the actual discussion whether more bug
> fix releases can be delivered by the distributions.
>
> Cheers
> Martin

Then I would vote for your original proposal of staggered intermediate 
releases in quick succession. At least that way we get a consistent 
set of source tarballs, and it is up to the distro maintainers to 
decide if they want to use all, or only some, of these intermediate 
releases.
Oh well, at least I sparked a fruitful discussion ;-)

Cheers, Eric

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