After reading one of Aaron Seigo’s lasts blogs, I feel the need to respond to it.

First point is the very complex reasoning of the available time to do new features with a six months release cycle, which according to Aarons calculation means that half of the year we are in non-feature development. I don’t understand that. On may 19th the Hard Feature Freeze kicks in. That means that from the 6 months cycle, roughly 2 months are spent in absolute freeze. Which means 4 months of feature development. And even if that’s to short, you can continue to develop in a branch.

I hear you scream that svn branches suck. Yep, true, but moving it to git repositories will give you a lot more overhead and merging that all back at intervals to KDE’s svn will frustrate you as well. And I feel you will miss the eyes that now look over your shoulder when you commit things. I think it is one of the strong points of svn. With git you usually merge a completed feature, making the diff too large for people to check on the mailinglists. At least I prefer ten smaller commits to review than one big one.

After the period merge back, people using KDE’s svn will make build fixes, etc. That will need to sync back to the git repository. I’m sorry, but if you want more hacking time, this is not the way to go in my opinion.

I also disagree with the general remark that a ‘six month cycle’ does not work for you in this project. How on earth is it possible to judge that, when the very first cycle is not even completed. Even the full feature freeze has not started. I always learned from my mother (hi mam!) that I need to give it a try for a couple of times before deciding it does not work.

Because it is the first time, it is also possible that we tweak the schedule a bit. The schedule is not set in stone and if you have reasons to change things, mail the release-team.

So, I’ve no concrete solutions for the problems mentioned in Aarons blog, but I do feel the conclusion that a 6 months cycle does not work for Plasma development is a bit premature. I can understand that a new project requires a lot of setup for the infratructure, but when that’s done things will get easier.