PIM: Version alignment

[Ben Cooksley]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 17 September 2016 08:22:20 Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> From their perspective their distribution shipped them Applications
>> 15.10 (as that will be what the release notes say) yet when they got
>> to report a bug they won't find those version numbers.
>
> This argument is flawed. It ignores that a lot of KDE applications
> (actually most KDE applications) are not released as part of a KDE
> Applications release. Obviously, none of these KDE applications shares
> the version number of the KDE Applications release. Are the users
> confused about the versions of those applications, too?

Anything outside the KDE Applications release module is not relevant
here - these applications will have separate release announcements
which will contain the appropriate version numbers.

>
> Taking your argument one step further: Any application released with
> Ubuntu 16.04 (to name a random example) should share the same version
> number because otherwise users could be confused if they wanted to
> report a bug in an application shipped with Ubuntu 16.04. I hope that
> the absurdity of this proposal is obvious.

The version numbers used by our distributors are not relevant - most
release notes will state which version of KDE software they're
delivering.

>
> If a user is confused about the version of a specific application, then
> a simple check of Help->About <app name> (or an <app> --version on the
> command line) will clarify the version.
>
> And if Help->Report Bug does not automatically set the correct version,
> then the application's maintainer is not doing his/her job properly (or
> the Report Bug functionality or Bugzilla is broken).

Considering this is the case for numerous PIM components (KMail,
Kontact, KOrganizer, Akregator, Akonadi and others) i'm considering
PIM as an entire group to have collectively disregarded their
responsibilities as maintainers. More than suitable justification for
having your version numbers harmonized from my perspective.

>
> Moreover, I agree that it's confusing for potential contributors that
> the tags in the repositories do not match the version numbers. This
> should be fixed by creating tags matching the version numbers
> additionally to the KDE_Applications_YY.MM tags. IMO that's also part of
> the maintainers' job for all applications that are part of the KDE
> Applications release, but that do not share the KDE Applications version
> number.
>
> Last, but not least, all applications that are part of the KDE
> Applications release should define their version in a standardized way,
> so that it can be extracted automatically to update Bugzilla and maybe
> also to set the additional version tag.
>
>
>> Also, these
>> versions have already been added on Bugzilla, so the confusion is
>> present amongst our own developers as well.
>
> The version numbers in Bugzilla can be fixed easily. Even for long
> released applications.
>
>
>> From my perspective, this discord should be eliminated by harmonizing
>> the version numbers.
>
> A partial harmonization of the version numbers (because you cannot
> harmonize the version numbers of all KDE applications) won't fix
> anything.
>
>
> Regards,
> Ingo

Regards,
Ben