Nate Graham, Plasma Developer and KDE Board Member, has detailed the plans for future KDE Plasma releases. After the release of Plasma 6, the previous four-month intervals are to be retained or even reduced to three months so that the code can mature quickly. Once the release is considered stable, the KDE project intends to transition to a six-month release cycle.
Nate Graham, Plasma Developer and KDE Board Member, has now announced his acceptance of the new release cycle.
(Image: Screenshot / dmk)
Graham already had the suggestion submitted four months ago, now it was confirmed on Tuesday of this week. As Graham writes in the confirmation, the KDE team wants to meet with representatives of Linux distributions with discrete release plans.
KDE: Coordinate release cycle with major distributions
“As part of this, we will be holding a meeting with representatives from discrete release distros that also release twice a year (Ubuntu/Kubuntu, OpenSUSE Leap, and Fedora KDE) to find a release timing,” said Graham. The goal is to work together to find a release date that will allow the distributions to equip their own releases with the latest plasma version. So far it could happen that they had to skip a release “and included something really old”.
However, coordination with Debian is not in the specification. Their release cycle is too unpredictable and also much too long for the KDE developers.
The longer publication period ultimately also leads to longer beta phases. Their length is to be determined at another point in time. The KDE developers encourage distributions that release beta releases to do so on a rolling basis, “essentially how Neon Unstable does it”. Should that prove impracticable, for example due to incompatibilities between their infrastructure and the KDE infrastructure, the KDE project intends to provide updated beta tarballs on a weekly basis. Otherwise, the version numbering scheme remains unchanged.
(dmk)