Hi, TL;DR Let's document the rough date for branching in the Gear schedule, so it's less a surprise and can be planned with.
Other than Plasma and KDE Frameworks, with KDE Gear the branching on a new main release does not happen the same day as the Beta tagging, but some time before, given the amount of work involved with the big amount of repos which needs a bigger time window, where those doing the work cannot easily be sure to be able to do that on a certain day when the schedule is planned and agreed on months/weeks before. Right now the schedule simply omits any mention of the branching (cmp. e.g. https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_21.08_Schedule). And I might not be the only one who is caught by surprise every time :) because one forgot what happened 3 months before and also mixes things up with how Plasma & KF do it. And as by tendency one usually has some MRs around which should get in before feature freeze setting in, the branching can get in the way, despite the information being given post-branching usually by email and blog post (E_NOTREADMLANDPLANETINTIME). As Albert and Heiko, as just discussed on irc, think they should be able to at least commit to planning the branching between dependency freeze and Beta tagging, I hereby propose to have the rough branching date officially documented in the schedule from now on. Cheers Friedrich
