On 2024-09-11 11:39, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Wed, Sep 11, 2024 at 11:26 AM Lubos Kocman via openSUSE Factory <factory@lists.opensuse.org> wrote:
We shall officially reach out to KDE regarding timing for Plasma 6 LTS and Leap 16.X https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6
Antonio told me that he'll raise it on KDE Advisory Board meeting (10th of October)
I'm going to make the controversial statement that we *SHOULD NOT* ask for a Plasma 6 LTS. For one, in the time we've had Plasma 5 LTS releases, I have rarely (if ever) seen any of us in openSUSE contributing to supporting it upstream. And two, the user experience churn rate is nowhere near as high now as it was at the beginning of Plasma 5. In my experience with KDE Plasma in EPEL for RHEL/CentOS, I saw that the user base was considerably happier when we stopped shipping Plasma LTS and moved to tracking Plasma stable releases.
KDE Plasma is not part of SLE, nor is SUSE committing any resources to support Plasma LTS upstream to make it a meaningfully useful output. KDE Plasma in openSUSE is completely community maintained, so we should optimize for what is reasonable in that model. Synchronizing content with Tumbleweed periodically is more sustainable than making KDE produce some kind of LTS with no additional committed maintenance help.
Even with all this, if we want to ask for Plasma 6 LTS, we should be prepared to offer to help with developing and maintaining it. I don't want us to be leeches.
I think this is a very valid argument. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with being "leeches", as long as we're not adding a burden to the upstream we're leaching from. But requesting an LTS from an upstream certainly does seem like adding a burden to me. We really shouldn't be pressuring any upstream to be doing anything for us if we're not also actively contributing to that effort.