KDE Community plans for Releases in the Future

Long post about releases ahead, brace yourselves!

Last week we released KDE Applications and KDE Platform 4.14.

KDE Applications, KDE Platform and KDE Workspaces were sometimes collectively referred as the "KDE Software Compilation" or "KDE SC" in short form, which is arguably a bad name, but it is what it is.

The "Software Compilation" started dying a while ago and 4.14 marks its end.

KDE Platform was 'virtually frozen' a long time ago, but we kept increasing the version number for some reasons that are now not important, so KDE Platform 4.14.x will be the last version, of course we will go to very high 'x' if there is bugfixes to be done.

KDE Frameworks 5 is the successor of KDE Platform based on Qt5, it's already on 5.1 and the team plans to release a new 5.x version with both features and bugfixes every month.

KDE Workspaces was frozen at 4.11.x, in fact if you check your distro, you are probably using 4.11.somehighnumber, the plan is to keep doing releases for at least a year if there are bugfixes available.

Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Workspaces based on KF5, it's currently at 5.0.1. The team plans releasing a stable 5.x.y version every month with bugfixes and a 5.x+1 feature release every three months.

That leaves us with the third component of the old releases, "KDE Applications", comprised of more than 100 applications. We want those to move to Qt5 and KF5 since it's simply a better world, but we're not going to do it all at once as we did in 4.0. We will give the maintainers the choice to move as they feel the quality of their KF5 port is good enough.

KDE Applications has been having feature releases every four months, with bugfix releases in the three months in between.

We don't plan changing that, but to highlight that applications can be used independently of the libraries used to build the desktop you are using, we're just going to use a time approach for version numbers, that is, next release will be "KDE Applications 14.12"

And that marks the end of the SC era since libraries, desktop and applications are now in a separate release schedule.

Also, if you are at akademy we're having a short session Sunday at 10:40, and I guess i'll schedule a BoF later in the week.

Akademy 2014 needs *you*

Akademy 2014 is just 3 weeks away.

If you haven't registered, you should register now, but since probably you are registered already, the next step is thinking if you want to be a volunteer.

Every big event needs volunteers: infodesk people, session chairs, video operators, etc.

If you want to make Akademy 2014 a success please go over to https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2014/Volunteers and sign yourself up!

KDE Randa Meetings 2014 - The End

Everything, good or bad, reaches to an end. So will do the KDE Randa Meetings 2014 in a few hours.

I can't say all the great stuff that has happened here the last few days, but i'll try to summarize:
* The book is looking great and something that would help us grow
* api.kde.org got some love and more to come in the future.
* Planning on making life easier for newbies trying to compile and contribute patches
* KF5 ports of lots of programs in progress
* Lots of planning on automating tasks
* GCompris being more KDE
* Bugfixing everywhere
* Awesome people all around

Thanks to everyone that donated in the Randa 2014 fund-raiser.

Thanks Mario for such a beautiful event.

And of course, do not forget about the next big KDE event you should to attend: AKADEMY 2014 in 3 weeks!

KDE Randa Meetings 2014 Day 4

Time flies when you're in good company, i planned to blog every day and now i realize we're on day 4 already.

Well, here comes some of the things i've been doing
* Participated in a few discussions about "the KDE SDK" Aleix seems very promising to recruit new developers :) Let's see if I can convince Aleix to blog about it
* KGeography port to KF5 started by David Gil is now complete.
* Started and finished Blinken port to KF5
* Made some patches for some frameworks while porting KGeography

Some of the cool things I've seen:
* kdenlive cleaning up their code to ease maintaince
* GCompris, a nice educational tool for children
* The KF5 Book is shaping up nicely
* Lots of KF5 porting and refining everywhere

Let's keep rolling!

KDE Randa Meetings 2014 Day 1

I wasn't planning on attending KDE Randa Meetings 2014 but last Wednesday I decided to, so bought some not so cheap plane and train tickets (don't worry, I payed from my own pocket) and here I am surrounded by awesome KDE hackers in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

I want to thank the more than 400 people that helped us fund KDE Randa Meetings 2014, you are awesome and directly responsible of improvements that are to come to millions of users in the world.

And remember we still need money to fund more sprints and stuff, so head over to our donations page and help us improve the world!

Help the KDE promo team do their work

We KDE developers have been working on the KDE Applications 4.14 release for the past four months, we've implemented features and important bugfixes. Now the release is near, and we have to write release notes so that our users get the message.

The thing about writing release notes is that you can't write about stuff you don't know, and KDE Applications is biiiiiiiiig so it's impossible for a small group of promo people to know all that happened to it in the last 4 months.

This means *you* developers have to help the promo team write the promo highlighting the most important changes you did to your app and writing them at https://notes.kde.org/p/release_4.14_kde-devel_notes so they can write a more distilled and promo-like text.

Please help them help you.