Last week we finished the KDE 4.5 release schedule. The good news is that you can start organising your release party now, the expected date for KDE 4.5.0 is August 4th 2010.
We made some changes compared to the 4.4 release schedule. Sometimes I feel we to many rules in the release schedule, but we need to acknowledge that as we keep growing we need some more guidance in the release schedule to get to the release.
In this release schedule there a couple of new Freezes, let me go over them quickly:
Dependecy Freeze
The dependecy freeze is there to let everyone know that KDE’s dependencies are fixed from that day on. This prevents surprises for packagers and svn users. From that moment on the versions of the software we depend on are fixed and no new dependencies can be introduced.
API Freeze
This freeze means that the public API should not change anymore. This is important for the bindings-team. They need to provide binding for each API and rapidly changing API causes them much extra work, and that resulted in some difficulties with bindings tarball at beta and rc-time. The API freeze comes in two flavours, read about them in the schedule.
Message Freeze
We experimented a bit with that in the last cycle, and we now made a more formal. The i18n teams are ok with the corrections of typo’s until quite late in the schedule, which is big improvement in my book. That means we now have a soft message freeze where you can fix the typos if you cc the mailinglist. The hard message freeze kicks in much later.
Tagging Freeze
24 hours before each tagging we are now freezing the repository. That means nobody should commit anything until the tag is placed. The only exception are build system fixes. That means we are no longer tagging a random subversion revision, test if it compiles and then release it, no, we now have a tagging freeze. Each arch can now check if everything builds and then we add the tag. I’m hoping this will help a lot in creating tarballs that compile on all supported platforms.
And now for the link you have all been waiting for:
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.5_Release_Schedule
If you have any questions, please look at the schedule for more info and you can always leave a comment here or mail the release team.
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