Draft for Plasma 6.5 schedule

[Martin Riethmayer]

Hi everyone,

as just discussed on Matrix (plasma-devel), I've drafted a release 
schedule (quick'n'dirty, in a LO calc sheet, easy to update dates and 
with automatic wiki-page content generation) for future Plasma releases. 
For Plasma 6.5, this could result in this schedule:

6.4.80	repo and feature freeze	2025-09-04
6.4.90	6.5 Beta 1	2025-09-18
6.4.91	6.5 Beta 2	2025-10-02
TAR		2025-10-16
6.5.0		2025-10-21
6.5.1		2025-10-28
6.5.2		2025-11-04
6.5.3		2025-11-18
6.5.4		2025-12-09
6.5.5		2026-01-13
6.5.6		2026-03-10

Things to note:
- The schedule is based on the 3-releases-a-year model, thus I aimed for 
6.5.0 to be about 4 months after 6.4.0 (scheduled for 2025-06-17).
It's also based on the release of the "best matching" frameworks 
release, which influences the date fo Beta 1 (i.e. Beta 1 "will usually 
happen on Thursday following the corresponding KDE Frameworks release" 
[1] ), which would in turn make 6.5 depend on FW 6.14. Those two kind of 
influence each other.
- Required Qt version could probably be as high as Qt 6.10, but that is 
set to be released in September 2025 [2] so that might be a bit risky. 
If it's anything other than 6.8 (e.g. if 6.5 depends on Qt 6.9), CI has 
to be updated in time and admins have to be notified about this
- The release date of the 6th bugfix release of the 6.4 series (6.4.6) 
currently coincides with 6.5.2 (Nov 4th), my suggestion would be to 
slightly diverge from the fibonnaci-sequence for 6.4.6 and delay that by 
one week (this same overlap has already happened for 6.3.6 and 6.4.2)
- I have not taken into consideration any release schedules of 
distributions (e.g. Kubuntu 25.10, Fedora, openSUSE etc.), which would 
probably work better with the switch to the 2-releases-a-year schedule, 
anyway.

Let me know your thoughts on this, I'm happy to adjust the schedule or 
(if it's at least a good draft) to put it on the wiki and the 
phabricator calendar.

Best regards

Martin


[1] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6#Beta
[2] https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing