On Friday 10 June 2011 09:23:43 Aaron J. Seigo wrote: > On Friday, June 10, 2011 03:49:21 Harald Sitter wrote: > > More frequent releases does not translate to more frequent adoption > > though, so I doubt it would have much affect for distros and 3rd party > > developers > > i agree that this is the case on the desktop, but it would be rather useful > for those working on non-desktop form factors. those of us working on > tablets are already facing this issue. > > it would also allow us to hit a greater number of distro's release cycles > with new releases. right now we release twice per year, and there are more > significant distro releases than that. which means some distros come out > with something relatively old, and some with something newer. by shortening > the cycle, a distro may ship something as close to their package freeze > cycle as possible. to me, this is more palatable than trying to allign our > releases to one specific downstream's release cycle.
Ack. > it can also relieve us of doing frequent bug fix releases as we do now: > instead of a bug fix every month and a new feature release every 6, we could > do an actual release every two. we would probably still do large promo > treatments at time-based punctuations through the year and we may also > elect to keep a "long term branch" that rolls over once a year where we > backport critical fixes to (release could be left up to packagers?) Having a long term branch indeed sounds very handy and raises a point to be ironed out. How long is one invidual release going to be supported officially? I reckon most distributions have at least 1 year of support and sometimes prelonged support (think Ubuntu's LTS releases). Especially for enterprise distributions something that is "supported" (in terms of receiving critical bug fixes) for a longer period of time is a mission critical thing. In particular I could imagine a long term branch to primarily receive input from those stakeholders. If a paying customer requests a fix to be shipped in a distro package, they might as well push it upstream, without much effort. Though perhaps that is wishful thinking. At any rate, if such a branch were limited to critical fixes I suppose it would be as easy for the packagers as applying a patch every once in a while, which I believe to be a very managable effort. -- Harald _______________________________________________ release-team mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
