I went to the theatre tonight to see a modern interpretation of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia. Parts of the play were rather beautiful, with singing and acrobat acts, the longer monologues I found rather … long. So let’s talk about KDE’s release schedule instead.
There are two interesting things to note. First, if you’re running KDE’s SVN trunk/, and you haven’t done it yet, upgrade your Qt to one of the pre-releases of Qt 4.6. Starting on Saturday, we’ll allow changes to trunk/ that require a Qt 4.6. There are two important reasons for requiring Qt 4.6:
- Qt 4.6. has some rather nice new features. One of the more fancy news in 4.6 is the addition of Kinetic, the new animation framework in Qt. There are also rather huge improvements in QGraphicsView, so overall it’s well worth upgrading.
- Qt 4.6 is essentially what people will use with KDE 4.4. Distros shouldn’t hold back shipping Qt 4.6 only because we didn’t test that extensively with our code base. So we (the release team) rather decided to require Qt 4.6 starting Saturday, so we’ll be able to weed out compatibility problems in our own code base and we can point our friends in Oslo to possible problems and thereby help releasing a rock-solid Qt.
For those not yet knowing all the Git commands and Qt’s path on Gitorious off their head, here‘s how you can track Qt:
git clone git://gitorious.org/+kde-developers/qt/kde-qt.git qt-kde
So requiring 4.6 is a good idea. The drawback is that this means that KDE cannot release 4.4 until Qt 4.6 is released (our policy is not to depend on unreleased versions). The Qties have promised to deliver on schedule, so we stretched ours a bit. This means that the next KDE release (4.4) will be two weeks later than initially planned, and out in February. In more detail it looks like this:
- October 10th, 2009: Trunk depends on Qt 4.6
- November 4th, 2009: Soft Feature Freeze
- November 25th, 2009: Hard Feature Freeze
- November 25th, 2009: Message Freeze.
- November 25th, 2009: Tag KDE 4.4 Beta 1
- December 1st, 2009: Release KDE 4.4 Beta 1
- December 1st, 2009: Documentation/Handbook Freeze
- December 16nd, 2009: Tag KDE 4.4 Beta 2
- December 22th, 2009: Release KDE 4.4 Beta 2
- Januari 5th, 2010: Artwork and Bindings Freeze
- January 5th, 2010: Tag KDE 4.4 RC 1
- January 6th, 2010: Release KDE 4.4 RC 1
- January 19th, 2010: Tag KDE 4.4 RC 2
- January 20th, 2010: Release KDE 4.4 RC 2
- February 3rd, 2010: Tag KDE 4.4
- February 9th, 2010: Release KDE 4.4
So you’ll still be able to install 4.4 for your dear before Valentine’s day and spread the Free Software love this way. Isn’t that divine?
When is Qt 4.6 suppose to be released?
In December, as far as I know. This way, the second beta can be tested with Qt 4.6.0, and we don’t change the platform under our feet during the release candidate phase.
Quoting an email from Thiago:
Hello!
I cloned qt-kde and it is still qt 4.5.3. Will you change the version on saturday too?
The kde-qt tree won’t be switched for now, as that might break 4.3.x testing. You can checkout (and track) the 4.6 branch (from within your kde-qt.git tree)
git checkout --track -b 4.6-stable-patched origin/4.6-stable-patched
… or use qt.git, which would give you quicker updates but might be a bit more unstable at times.