Don't ask for Plasma 6 LTS (was Re: openSUSE Release Engineering meeting 11.09.2024)
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. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
Hello Neal, I generally heard only a good feedback for Plasma in Leap and generally openSUSE (intentionally skipping immutable part where I don't have much insight). Leap by its nature should preferably pick LTS versions of software. That was our strategy for the distro, and I'd prefer to keep it. Leap users expect to stick on single KDE version for 18 months, and I'm not sure if we can deliver this reliably with a non-LTS version (thinking of all the relevant integration testing on maintenance side in case of version bump etc). Our desktop situation in 16.X, when it comes to desktop commitment from SUSE, is in a bit different than in 15.X. This would mean that we can deliver very similar experience to KDE users as in Leap 15.X. Where again I heard no complains. I have to deffer the "help with development" question to our KDE folks. Do we have any insight into commitment on development from Kubuntu side? (I'd say a second big LTS consumer aside from Leap). Lubos On Wed, Sep 11, 2024 at 11:39 AM Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> 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.
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
-- Best regards Luboš Kocman openSUSE Leap Release Manager
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.
We're asking for LTS, because it's already mentioned on their schedule page (without our involvement). from: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6 """ LTS releases No scheduled LTS releases yet. If distributions find LTS releases useful, we will schedule those in close cooperation with the corresponding distributions. """ I'd say we fit the "useful" part quite well. Lubos On Wed, Sep 11, 2024 at 12:52 PM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
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.
-- Best regards Luboš Kocman openSUSE Leap Release Manager
On 2024-09-11 13:27, Lubos Kocman via openSUSE Factory wrote:
We're asking for LTS, because it's already mentioned on their schedule page (without our involvement). from: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6
""" LTS releases
No scheduled LTS releases yet. If distributions find LTS releases useful, we will schedule those in close cooperation with the corresponding distributions. """
I'd say we fit the "useful" part quite well.
Lubos
Indeed, but I think both Neal and myself are suggesting we haven't demonstrated an ability to provide "close cooperation" And if that's going to continue to be the case I'd argue the ethical route is to not ask for it, no matter how useful it may be. -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew McDonald, Werner Knoblich
participants (3)
-
Lubos Kocman -
Neal Gompa -
Richard Brown