KDE Considering Three Month Release Schedule

Àlex Fiestas, KDE developer, has recently proposed a three month release schedule for major releases as opposed to the six month schedule now being practiced. He says it should reduce work load and allow users to get new features quicker. According to his post, almost everyone is on-board with the idea.

Fiestas posted of his proposal on the KDE Core Developers mailing list yesterday saying, "the idea is to cut testing time and compensate it by keeping master always in a "releasable" state, now that two major components are frozen it looks like it is a good time to get used to it." On the KDE Community Wiki, his official proposal states the change will "reduce the amount of time between releases and make them simpler, making us able to deliver new features faster to our users while keeping if not improving the current quality." Fiestas believes starting sooner rather than later is best proposing the new schedule commence with the start of 4.12 development when 4.11 is branched.

The long-time KDE developer says he's check around with distribution developers from Kubuntu and Fedora and other KDE sub-project developers and all but one is either neutral or like the idea. The discussion that followed has reached 51 responses and many of those are raising objections. Of particular interest to your humble correspondent is the response by Laurent Montel on KDEPIM who states that time frame would put a real burden on his small team. He thinks this reduced schedule will only increase bugs.

Discussion will continue for days and Fiestas is hoping to have enough feedback to discuss it further at Akademy on July 17. We'll probably learn more then.