Applications 17.12 as LTS release?

[Elvis Angelaccio]

On lunedì 31 luglio 2017 23:00:37 CEST, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El dilluns, 31 de juliol de 2017, a les 12:19:48 CEST, Elvis Angelaccio va 
> escriure:
>> Hi all,
>> I'd like to discuss whether we can make the next Applications release an
>> LTS release. What would be needed from a practical point of view? (changes
>> to release/i18n scripts, etc.?)
>> 
>> About the schedule, I think we could release the LTS tarballs 
>> the same day ...
>
> What you need is buy-in from developers not from releasers, if developers 
> agree this is a good idea, we sure can try to make this happen.

That's what I hoped to hear, thanks. I agree we need to be sure we actually 
*want* to do an LTS, but I asked here first because I wanted to be sure we 
*can*.

>
> But since you came to the release-team i'll give you my 
> part-of-release-team-
> opinion anyway :D
>
> I don't think it will work, and what we will have is something 
> we call LTS but 
> we don't really get much fixes in anyway.
>
> If you look at the bugfixes in .MICRO releases, they are usually decreasing
>
> 17.04.1 - ~20 
> 17.04.2 - ~15
> 17.04.3 - ~25 <-- exception
>
> 16.12.1 - ~40
> 16.12.2 - ~20
> 16.12.3 - ~20
>
> 16.08.1 - ~45
> 16.08.2 - ~30
> 16.08.3 - ~20
>
> 16.04.1 - ~25
> 16.04.2 - ~25
> 16.04.3 - ~20
>
> 15.12.1 - ~30
> 15.12.2 - ~30
> 15.12.3 - ~15
>
> There may be several reasons for that:
>  * We actually fix all the bugs so there's fewer to fix for .3 (unlikely :D)
>
>  * Developers forget there's a stable branch or if there's 
> going to be another 
> release of it so juts code the fix in master anyway (we know 
> that people are 
> kind of bad remembering the schedule)
>
>  * After N months, code in stable diverges from master enough 
> that developers 
> only fix bugs in master since the pain of having to code the 
> fix twice is too 
> high.
>
>
> And that is my developer-opinion, fixing bugs in a stable branch is often 
> painful but doable, but having a LTS that branched long time 
> ago is no fun at 
> all.
>
> This is something that companies (i.e. Red Hat et al) ask a lot 
> of money for, 
> exactly because of that, because it's not fun and because it's hard to make 
> sure the patch even if it may apply, fixes the same thing in the same way 
> without any side effect.
>
> In my opinion this is something we should not be doing and I 
> don't think it's 
> a good investment of our developer-time, but who am I to say what our 
> developers should be working? So again, goto first line, and 
> try to convince 
> the developers, not the releasers :)

Very good points which we should properly discuss on kde-devel. I'll start 
another thread there.

>
> Good luck,
>   Albert
>
>
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Elvis
>
>
>
>