KDE plans for the squeeze cycle

[Ana Guerrero]

My thoughts... this is just a draft, add your thoughts/extra information or if
you just agree, and we'll try to get a final mail.
I would be nice if we hear from modax before sending anything too (he is in
vac).

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 02:41:27PM +0200, Marc Brockschmidt wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> As announced on dda [RT1], we want to get an impression when releasing
> Squeeze is feasible. We have proposed a (quite ambitious) freeze in December
> 2009, and some developers have noted that their planned changes wouldn't be
> possible in this time frame. So, to find out when releasing would work for
> most people, it would be great if you could answer the following questions:
>

I will answer your including also Qt 4 plans, that as you know is a quite
important part for KDE 4 :)
There is also a bunch of widely used kde apps that do not belong to KDE
core, but they are leaf apps.

> * Which major upstream releases of KDE are expected in the next two
>   years? Which of those are material for Debian stable, which might be a bit
>   flaky?
> 

We currently have KDE 4.3.0 in unstable and we will have at least a couple of point
releases before this year ends.

KDE 4.4 is expected about January 2010.
KDE 4.5 is expected about July 2010.

It is not a good idea to do more speculation about dates after this point
because in KDE they are also testing new release management methods...

About flaky releases, usually 0 point releases have some bugs and 1 point
releases are highly preferred to ship in a Debian stable release.


We currently have Qt 4.5.2 in the archive and if it even could get another
point release, the development and expectations are on Qt 4.6.
There is not public release schedule for Qt 4.6, but worse case scenario, I
think there will be at least a pre-release by december. Qt 4.5 was released in
March 2009, I really expect Qt 4.6 being release before Qt 4.5 is one year
old.

Whether KDE 4.4 will need Qt 4.6 or not, is still unknown, it depends a lot of 
Qt 4.6 release date.

> * How much time do you usually need from a new upstream release of KDE
>   to a stable Debian package in unstable?
>

Major releases:
We usually are able to have the packages ready by the day of the release since
we always get the final tarballs between 5-7 days before the release.
In almost all the major releases, we need to put some stuff throught NEW and 
sometimes this is faster, sometimes it is not so fast.


> * How many "big" transitions will the upcoming changes cause? When should those
>   happen? Can we do something to make them easier?
> 

Nothing I can think of now, we already have done most of the complicated stuff
when moving from kde 3 to kde 4.

Something it would be very nice to do for Squeeze is killing more kde 3 apps.
Specially, some of the kde 3 apps that are not ported and have somehow a replacement 
in kde 4.  This is being doing slowly [0]. Anyway, with the current dates you
are proposing, I am almost sure kdelibs(4c2a) from kde 3 will have to be kept 
for Squeeze (plus Qt 3, of course) and it will be hard because they are quite 
dead upstream...
What could be removed is arts (and we would love to), but it needs some work on it.


In summary:
We would like a Squeeze release with KDE 4.4.0 at least (4.4.1 if possible) and
Qt 4.6. For us december work quite *bad*, if you freeze  in december we'll
have some kde 4.3.x and from january we'll be using 4.4, if the freeze last a
few months (*), by July we will be using 4.6 and it will be quite hard to care
about bugs in KDE 4.3.x, that will be from 2 releases ago....

(*) I am sorry but it is not crazy thinking about this happening...

[0] http://wiki.debian.org/kdelibs4c2aRemoval