KDE Might Move To A Three Month Release Schedule

[schmalzler]

You haven't been paying any attention whatsoever to the discussion. They are in maintenance mode. That means, by definition, that they are being maintained. That is, bug fixes only, but no new features. So no, bugs will not be closed as unmaintained, because they are explicitly being maintained.

You never browsed through the kde bugtracker.
Bugs get closed "Resolved unmaintained" if the bug is reported against an older version. You often find reports from debian users, who have kde-4.8. Current kde stable is 4.10. Those bugs very often get closed as "unmaintained". Between 4.8.4 and 4.10.0 are 6 months. If this falls down to 3 you will get way more "unmaintained" reports - even in maintainance mode.

[TheBlackCat]

You never browsed through the kde bugtracker.
Bugs get closed "Resolved unmaintained" if the bug is reported against an older version. You often find reports from debian users, who have kde-4.8. Current kde stable is 4.10. Those bugs very often get closed as "unmaintained". Between 4.8.4 and 4.10.0 are 6 months. If this falls down to 3 you will get way more "unmaintained" reports - even in maintainance mode.

Thanks for proving my point. The whole point of putting plasma and kdelibs in LTS mode is that it will be much longer before bugs are closed as "unmaintained".

[Awesomeness]

You never browsed through the kde bugtracker.
Bugs get closed "Resolved unmaintained" if the bug is reported against an older version. You often find reports from debian users, who have kde-4.8. Current kde stable is 4.10. Those bugs very often get closed as "unmaintained". Between 4.8.4 and 4.10.0 are 6 months. If this falls down to 3 you will get way more "unmaintained" reports - even in maintainance mode.

Old versions are no longer maintained. Fixes are in newer versions. It's not KDE's fault that Debian with its great retardation ships outdated software.
KDE's Applications are ? in Debian terminology ? leaf packages. Debian considers upgrading the underlying frameworks too risky but not necessarily applications (see Chromium). Considering that kdelibs are in feature freeze since 4.9, upgrading the applications is fine according to Debian policy. The people at Debian just have to follow their own policy or take responsibility for all bugs in their outdated packages.

[Adaptee]

You never browsed through the kde bugtracker.
Bugs get closed "Resolved unmaintained" if the bug is reported against an older version. You often find reports from debian users, who have kde-4.8. Current kde stable is 4.10. Those bugs very often get closed as "unmaintained". Between 4.8.4 and 4.10.0 are 6 months. If this falls down to 3 you will get way more "unmaintained" reports - even in maintainance mode.

You know, after 4.8.5 is released, the 4.8.x series reaches end of life. No developers will spend time in backporting bug fixes to the 4.8 branch. So KDE SC 4.8.5 is unmaintained by definition.

[schmalzler]

Yes, you are both right, of course. But my point was that by halving the life time distributions need to hurry to jump on new versions, if they don't want to ship bugs that won't get fixed by upstream. But that will cause trouble with two other rules for distributions: 1) Don't adopt .0-releases! 2) Let there be at least one month before considering a package as stable candidate.
If you stay with monthly bugfix releases you will have only one month before the version you ship runs out of maintainance.