Draft for Plasma 6.6 schedule

[Ben Cooksley]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2025 at 10:14 PM Martin Riethmayer <ripper at freakmail.de>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>

Hi Martin,


>
> with the holiday season coming up, I'd like to propose a schedule for
> Plasma 6.7 before that.
>
> Plasma 6.7 might be a bit special, as it's the last version with X11
> support [3], and there was the question raised, if some extra bug-fix
> releases should be scheduled for 6.7, i.e. making 6.7 the first LTS
> release for Plasmas 6.X series?
>
> This could be a possible schedule with 2 additional bugfix releases:
>
> 6.6.80          2026-04-23 (repo and soft feature freeze)
> 6.6.90  Beta 1  2026-05-07
> 6.6.91  Beta 2  2026-05-21
> 6.7.0   TAR     2026-06-04
> 6.7.0   Release 2026-06-09
> 6.7.1           2026-06-16
> 6.7.2           2026-06-23
> 6.7.3           2026-07-07
> 6.7.4           2026-07-28
> 6.7.5           2026-09-01
> 6.7.6           2026-10-27
> 6.7.7           2027-01-26
> 6.7.8           2027-06-22
>

This sort of implies that we will have functional CI for the entire way
through to 6.7.8, which is much easier said than done.

A big part of the challenge here is that Plasma tends to require very new
versions of it's dependencies (which is why the CI system as a whole is
based on a rolling release distro). That means 6.7.0 will have to use CI
based on a rolling release image - as no released distro will be able to
meet those requirements - and then at some point subsequent to that the
series will have to transition to a conventional distribution. That will
require developing an additional image and everything else that comes along
with it.

We currently use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for our Linux CI, however it looks
like Leap 16.1 isn't due out until October 2026, with a freeze around
May-July 2026 (so it's questionable whether Plasma 6.7 will even ship in
Leap 16.1 given that release schedule depending on how flexible the
schedule is). If we can use Leap 16.1 it isn't too bad, otherwise we'd have
to develop an entire CI image build centered around another distribution -
which is substantially more expensive time investment wise.


>
>
> Things to note:
>
> - The schedule is based on the 3-releases-a-year model, thus I aimed for
> 6.7.0 to be about 4 months after 6.6.0 (scheduled for 2026-02-17).
> It's also based on the release of the "best matching" frameworks
> release, which influences the date of Beta 1 (i.e. Beta 1 "will usually
> happen on Thursday following the corresponding KDE Frameworks release"
> [1] ), which could in turn make 6.7 depend on FW 6.26. Those two kind of
> influence each other.
>
> - Required Qt version could remain at Qt 6.10, or could probably use Qt
> 6.11 which is currently scheduled to be released in March 2026[2].
>
> - I have not taken into consideration any release schedules of
> distributions
>

Given this is essentially planned to be an LTS release (given the support
out to mid-2027) that is quite relevant here I'd say.


>
> - The Blog post "Goig all-in on a Wayland future" [3] says "The Plasma
> X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027", which kind of
> implies at least one extra release (6.7.7). I've added another one
> (6.7.8) by Fibonacci-sequence (i.e. 21 weeks after 6.7.7) in my
> proposal, but this is just for showing the date. I'm not aware of any
> formal decision how many extra bug-fix releases will be made, so this is
> up for discussion if it should be reduced to less or extended to even
> more bug-fix releases. Also, it might be worth discussing if it's good
> to put an official "LTS" label on it, or to give an assurance like for
> Plasma 5.27 ("In case of urgent bugfixes or security issues, another
> release might be made")[4].
>
> Let me know your thoughts on this, I'm happy to adjust the schedule or
> (if no objections come) to put it on the wiki and the phabricator calendar.
>
> Best regards
>
> Martin
>

Thanks,
Ben


>
>
> [1] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6#Beta
> [2] https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing
> [3] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/
> [4] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5#Future_releases
>
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