Re: Releases in three months?

On Wednesday, July 10, 2013 17:34:50 Àlex Fiestas wrote:
> On Tuesday 09 July 2013 15:43:59 you wrote:
> > This idea needs more thought in my view.
> > 
> > What is the impact on users?
> > I do very little with the technical end of KDE. Mostly I work with
> > users and user groups. KDE releases are newsworthy. Making small
> > releases more often removes much of the newsworthiness. If the
> > releases are small and nearly inconsequential, then they really aren't
> > releases.
> 
> If this really happens, releases turn out to be inconsequential we can group
> a few of them and do big release announcements every 6/9 months.
> 
> And Idea would be increasing the first number more often, and making the big
> release announcement there. This will potentially have the nice side-effect
> of removing the fear that our users have since kde3-4 transition.
> 
> That will mean having:
> KDE 4.12
> KDE 4.13
> KDE 5
> KDE 5.1
> KDE 5.2
> KDE 6
> etc.

After reading the thread on k-c-d and here, I have the following to add about 
the effects of a shorter release cycle:

on the 'work' side:
* shorter means more OFTEN work, but less each time. A bit more in total.
* IF we'd get a more reliable list of features we'd have a much easier time 
and it won't matter much
   (improving bugzilla was mentioned, review board? commit digest would stand 
to benefit as well)

about the effects on our reach, users and marketing
* more frequent announcements excites/engages the 'faithful' more, but reaches 
less far. I believe that especially press will be much less inclined to pick 
up on it, we'd have to do more work to get certain features in the limelight.
* Of course, as Ann Wilson noted, USERS might think different. The smaller, 
more incremental changes give less disturbance of their work. On the other 
hand, with distro's having 6-8-12 month release cycles, this actually doesn't 
really change much for the majority of our users (and perhaps make the work of 
distro's harder).

From these arguments I'd like to conclude that we would probably gain 
prominence among our 'faithful users' but lose reach outside of that. Aaron 
noted that marketing needs to think outside the box.
* his idea: separating marketing from the release cycle; do twice or even just 
once a year a big push, highlighting all the changes from the past releases. 
We could even add Calligra and Amarok, talk about them.
* He even suggests to go Magazine style

This unfortunately does very little to solve the downside of us getting even 
less reach outside of our 'faithful users'. Especially a magazine would be 
read by them and only them. Press won't pick up on a 'big' push if it is 
rehashing news that's not new anymore - they want to report on fresh things.

And that last thing really is the key. I see for example my dutch favorite 
tech site occasionally (once every second release, usually) pick up KDE 
releases. I know it barely pays off for them in terms of readers and I'm quite 
certain they won't pick up on the overview of previous releases or something 
that we would do.

However, this is something we can ask journalists about: what do they think? 
I'm skeptical but who knows, it'd be awesome if I was wrong about it ;-) 

In any case, IF we go for a 3 month (or similarly short) release cycle, we 
need to think hard and deep about how to reach outside of our own circle. I 
honestly don't have great ideas on that but I haven't thought about it too 
much either, yet, let's talk at and during Akademy.

> Will be also a good way of voiding this big numbers that are not easy to
> use.
> > The title of the BoF at Akademy is "New KDE SC Release schedule". It
> > would be more accurate to have that be "Proposed more frequent release
> > schedule", which would make a difference for people who may want to be
> > involved.
> 
> Changed.
> 
> > Another thought...
> > Smaller releases more often would reduce the amount of work that goes
> > into release announcements. Further, it might be interesting to
> > feature individual applications, improvements and so forth. Since last
> > Akademy, there have been few product announcements. So people don't
> > really get the scope of what the KDE Community offers.
> > 
> > If we feature more individual applications, there would still be the
> > need for developer input. It seems like this might change the dynamics
> > of developer involvement.
> 
> This is in my humbler opinion something that should happen independently of
> whether we change the release schedule or not.

Agreed.

> Maybe we can organize a google hangout, or  a mumble to talk about this
> little bit further?

At least we should talk at Akademy, but of course not everyone of us is there.

> Cheers !
> 
> 
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