dE . posted on Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:25:42 +0530 as excerpted:
>> > The moment you open upgraded the KDE desktop you see bugs.
>>
>> Not here, on the contrary, KDE has become more stable and polished with
>> every release.
>>
>> How about joining the testing team and help with testing before the
>> release instead of just calling people names afterwards? If you want
>> Free Software to get better you can contribute yourself, but please do
>> it in a more constructive way.
>>
> I'm running on Gentoo, and I've to build the 9999 release for the
> purpose, which almost never works, and then reverting back becomes very
> difficult.
(As another gentooer...) Not really. No need for the live-9999 unless
you really want it, and that's not what Myriam was referring to.
What Myriam was suggesting (I know because I saw the same testing-team
invitation in the 4.10-pre-release announcements as well, with similar
but a bit more detailed wording) was to run the kde pre-release betas and
release-candidates and if desired, participate in the more organized pre-
release testing program kde's doing now with them.
While the stable bugfix updates appear on a monthly cycle (with feature
release updates on a semi-annual cycle), the pre-releases appear on a
condensed two-week cycle, with 4-5 pre-releases before the 4.y.0 feature
release.
Beta1 aka 4.x.80 (so the upcoming 4.11 pre-releases will start with beta1
as 4.10.80) typically appears a week after hard-feature-freeze, with
4.11's hard-feature-freeze scheduled for June 5, 2013 and beta1 (aka
4.10.80 tagging and release a week later on Wednesday, June 12.
4.11 beta2 aka 4.10.90 is scheduled two weeks later, Wednesday, June 26.
4.11 rc1 aka 4.10.95 is due after the hard API/Message/Artwork/Bindings
and Docs freeze (July 8), with tagging and release scheduled for
Wednesday July 10, two weeks after beta2.
4.11 rc2 aka 4.10.97 is due two weeks later, on Wednesday July 24, with
the final 4.11.0 feature release currently scheduled, assuming everything
goes well up to then, for Wednesday Aug 7.
However, it's worth noting that for 4.10 some blocker bugs were
discovered during testing, and a third rc was added, delaying 4.10.0 a
couple extra weeks to ensure a smoother general release.
KDE's schedules and feature plans are released publicly (with the caveat
that they're tentative and subject to change), BTW, with links to the
schedules/plans for each feature release found on kde techbase, here:
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules
The testing-team invitation I mentioned above appeared with the
announcement for 4.10-rc1 (I just checked the beta announcements and
didn't see it there), which can be found here (see the testing and
getting involved sections):
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.10-rc1.php
Quoting:
KDE is running an extra detailed beta-testing program throughout the 4.10
beta and RC releases. [...] Beta Testing Program is structured so that
any KDE user can give back to KDE, regardless of their skill level. If
you want to be part of this quality improvement program, please contact
the Team on the IRC channel #kde-quality on freenode.net. The Team
Leaders want to know ahead of time who is involved in order to coordinate
all of the testing activities. They are also committed to having this
project be fun and rewarding. After checking in, you can install the beta
through your distribution package manager. The KDE Community wiki has
instructions. This page will be updated as beta packages for other
distributions become available. With the beta installed, you can proceed
with testing. Please contact the Team on IRC #kde-quality if you need
help getting started.
There's a link to the mentioned wiki as well as distro-specific testing
instructions. For gentoo, the gentoo/kde project overlay, the same place
you'll find the 9999-live-build versions, carries the pre-releases.
I started running the pre-releases with the 4.7 rcs and have run them all
since, tho I choose not to run the live-versions. That's why I know so
much about them. However, I don't do IRC and didn't do the special
testing program; I've just run the betas, filing a couple bugs as I found
them, but most of the ones I've found have been gentoo/kde project
packaging bugs (generally minor dependency issues since I run a much
leaner kde desktop than most, USE-flag and installed-package wise), not
upstream kde bugs per se, so I've reported them to gentoo (tho there was
one upstream bug I filed for the 4.7 rcs, I think, that was fixed, but I
believe it was 4.7.1 before the fix was applied to the kde upstream
sources).
Along about rc1 time the branch also splits off, and gentoo maintains
branch-live builds as 4.x.49.9999 as well. These should be MUCH more
stable than the trunk-live builds, since they appear only after the
feature and I /think/ after the API/bindings/string freeze. In fact,
after the general 4.x.0 feature release, these should contain only the
fixes that will ultimately appear in the stable updates, except those
running live-branch will get them first (assuming they rebuild their kde
live-branch packages more frequently than the monthly stable release
cycle, anyway).
While I'm not ready for trunk-live, I already run the pre-releases, and
have seriously considered switching to branch-live. However, while I
have git installed and most of kde has switched to git, I don't have svn
installed, and a few packages (less every release) remain on svn. And I
remember the svn deps as rather more complex than I really want to deal
with, so I decided not to switch to kde-branch-live until the bits of kde
I actually install, mainly core-desktop, with much of the artwork and
many of the games, was all on git. Last I looked, mid-4.9 (before the
4.10 pre-releases hit IIRC) some of my installed kde packages were still
svn based, so I didn't switch. But with 4.10 I think some switched, and
I believe others are switching for 4.11, so I'll probably investigate
again and I may well switch to the 4.11.49.9999 live-branch builds when
they come out.
What I'm really looking forward to in terms of a good challenge, however,
is the kde5 frameworks betas, on qt5, but that's still a ways out AFAIK.
And the kde/wayland betas, giving me some real skin in the wayland game
instead of just reading about it here and there, but I believe that's out
even further... But 2014/2015 could be interesting indeed!
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
