Project Neon and stable branches

[Philip Muskovac]

Hi,

# with my Project Neon Maintainer Hat on: #

=== Short Version: ===
Doable with a bit of work if it's useful

=== Long Version: ===

What this would need at least:
- another ~ 15-20GiB Repository to hold the packages.
   (that's counting packages for 2 kubuntu releases)
- new source code imports for all stable branches
- new recipes for all of them.

Creating the source code imports and the recipes isn't too much work 
considering one can script that.
It could require forking some of the packaging branches, but that's not 
too much work either.
Project Neon by itself is pretty low maintenance. It's mostly checking 
package dependencies every now and then and keeping up with the git 
transition and new components.

The question here would be how many people would use this so it's worth 
the trouble to set it up and the additional load it would put on 
Launchpad's infrastructure.
If this would really help the kde-quality team it could be done though 
with not too much work.

# with my Kubntu Developer hat on: #

=== Going off topic: ===

We (me and Harald IIRC) were talking on IRC once how viable it would be 
to actually make daily builds of our official distribution packages.
+ One can always test the latest source code
+ It would help enable us to provide beta releases faster as we would be 
able to prepare the packaging even before tagging.
+ You would actually have proper language bindings which project-neon 
doesn't have. (I *tried* to get python to work, it's one big PITA)
- It would add several hundred new branches on Launchpad as we would 
need to branch off for the stable releases.
- What would the branches follow? Currently they follow the development 
release. But upstream git isn't what's in the archive. (Stable releases 
would be another thing if we branch those off anyway)
- Fairly high maintenance as one needs to constantly keep up with 
upstream changes.

Opinions from the rest of the Team?

Regards,
Philip

On 02/13/2013 12:15 AM, David Edmundson wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I have a question to project-neon devs, I'm not sure who's currently
> leading this, so I'm spamming the mailing list. (sorry everyone else)
>
> I'm on a purely research gathering mission for a thread in KDE, and
> this isn't a formal request or anything.
>
> On a scale of 1 to ridiculous, how much effort would it be to make a
> version of project neon that instead of tracking git master tracked
> the latest code in the 4.10 branch? Would it be just a copy and paste
> job from project neon/backports PPA with pretty low maintenance or is
> it just as much work as starting afresh?
>
> There's a current discussion about increasing the testing on KDE
> stable branches and making sure we don't introduce regressions between
> 4.10.1 and 4.10.2 (for example) as currently few people use and test
> that branch. It's halfway between stable and unstable branch that
> isn't really covered.
>
> David Edmundson
>
> (with my KDE Quality team hat on)
>