On Monday 08 July 2013 17:45:10 Philip Muskovac wrote: > Hi, > > With my Kubuntu Developer Hat on, one concern I have is the support > timeframe for the planned 4.13 release. Kubuntu 14.04, planned to be > released in April 2014 will be a Long Term Support release meaning we'll > have to care about it for quite a while. (And it might very well be our > last release based on KDE4/Qt4/X11 depending on how things go in the next > 1.5 years) > > I understand that we can have additional point releases if people still find > issues that need to be fixed, but with so many short release cycles I > expect that the attention for the previous release (even worse: the one > before that) will die quickly leaving the distributions with having to do > the bugfix backporting. > That's ofc. already the case for older releases, but shorter release cycles > only amplify the issue as no distribution will change their release cycle to > match the new KDE one. (leaving rolling distros aside)
Yes, my idea is to have interested parties to maintain whatever branch they are interested on, for example I know that Redhat is still maintaining 3.5.10 branch, which I think it is awesome but we have moved on. We can develop tools to make your life easier (distros) so you can maintain yourselves branches for things like LTS easier, I will be willing to develop such tools if needed. > As Scott pointed out, it will also lead to less distributions shipping the > same KDE SC release version which leads to less testing efforts for a > specific release and more support workload for the distributions later. Take into account that versions will be smaller, meaning less change, less work. > What would at least make my life easier here would be a way to easily get a > list of all patches that were applied to a stable release (esp. when someone > bothers to backport a fix after the last point release is out). > The only way to do that, that I found so far, is filtering out mails from > kde- commits, which is neither very easy nor reliable. If this is what it takes for having distros in, I propose myself to develop this system ! we can have a BoF in akademy perhaps to design such tool. Cheers !
