Plasma Active: stable, devel and bleeding edge

Every so many months we roll a new Plasma Active release. We've done three big releases so far and are working on a fourth for release in the early Spring. These releases are great for people using Plasma Active on a device or for device integrators looking to make a releasable product.

If you want to stay on the leading edge, however, you can follow the devel repositories from the Open Build Service. This is fun as you get to see our work in near real-time. At least when things build, and since we're talking about an entire operating system stack for these images that doesn't always hold. The devel repositories not only include our own work, but also new work done by the Mer community. Sometimes it can get a bit chaotic.

One of the things we wanted to change was the pain and difficulty of making production quality releases in the midst of the occasional chaos. One step towards doing this has been to adopt a new policy for the plasma-mobile repository: the master branch should always be stable. There should be no point in time when a feature freeze just to get things stable for a release is necessary. Development happens in branches, these branches are merged into an integration branch for testing and when proven then they are merged into master.

This will make it a lot easier for different groups putting out products on different schedules to be able to create their own release timetable: pick your dates and whenever you decide to branch from master it should be in a good state. There is no requirement in this scenario for everyone to follow the same release "cadence".

It also means that people who wish to follow development can do so in a rather less chaotic environment. They can follow the work in master and it should always be relatively unbroken. Releasable, even. Put another way, this shift in our development workflow allows us to treat plasma-mobile as a rolling release.

If it works for the plasma-mobile repository, I want to make the same shift in all the repositories (which we have control over anyways :) that go into making KDE's Plasma Workspaces.

Of course, how do we test that integration branch I mentioned earlier? On Plasma Active we now have a repository that draws from the integration branch. So those of us who want to follow development and can live with beta quality features and the occasional annoyance can track integration on our devices. This helps prove features before merge into master.

How hard is it to use to the integration branch? Right now you have to edit some text files in /etc to set up zypper to draw from the correct repos. This isn't much fun, though and so in Plasma Active 4 (or if you grab a devel build :) you can just visit the Development page in the Settings app:

Then on the next system update you'll get the integration branch versions of things. Easy peasy.