On 2/16/20 2:55 PM, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
Yes, this has been questioned a few times. Also seeing Plasma LTS used together with a non-LTS Qt is a bit strange. But somehow it seems there has not been enough pain for those using the Plasma LTS to change something. Possibly because distributions simply backport important bug fixes for KF themselves, kind of maintaining their own KF LTS version of the KF version they pinpointed to when they froze the ingredients to their OS. Because they are used to do this for other projects as well, and so miss this could be done in cooperation with upstream.
There has been pain. This thread mentions a number of examples, and There were quite a few for the last 5.12 LTS too. But more generally, the pain is baked into Frameworks due to the lack of any bugfix releases. For example Kubuntu 18.04 shipped with the Plasma 5.12 LTS and Frameworks 5.44. That Plasma version has continued to receive bugfix point releases since then. But the Frameworks product has not, and so users have now missed out on two years worth of bugfixes. I don't know about openSUSE, but I know that Kubuntu does not have the resources to backport individual KF bugfixes--I repeatedly requested this as I identified them and none ever got backported. But they do ship point releases for Plasma, so they could ship point releases for an LTS Frameworks version.
IMHO distributions using Plasma LTS, Plasma team & other stakeholders should team up here and maintain a matching LTS branch of Frameworks together at the central KDE repos together. Well, and a version also satisfying other clients of KF, like non-workspace applications from KDE. It's not a reason to change normal KF release cycle.
I like that idea. So perhaps we could say that the KF version which happens to be the dependency for a Plasma LTS release could have bugfix releases? Would that be reasonable?
Nate
