Plans for Kolab 3.5 community release

[Sultan Ghaznawi]

Hello Timotheus,

Thank you for shedding light on the community edition development for Kolab. I am new with Kolab, but very interested in contributing to testing and documentation. Additionally, my company (language translation) could probably help with localization and language part of the system. Please count me in and let me know how you would like to approach the next steps.

It would also be ideal if we create a forum site for Kolab where we could discuss on feature development as well as vote on priority of development items, I have seen it work very well for some open source projects.

Thanks,

Sultan

-----Original Message-----
From: Timotheus Pokorra [mailto:timotheus at kolab.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2015 2:20 AM
To: Kolab development coordination; users at lists.kolab.org
Subject: Plans for Kolab 3.5 community release

Hello all,

I am cross posting this to the users list as well, but please reply on the developers list for the technical discussion.

Most of us have been wondering what happened to the Kolab 3.5 release which was planned for August 2015. We got quite used to the half year release cycle...

Yesterday in IRC, there was a quick and good discussion with a number of people, and Jeroen (aka kanarip) stated that the community releases have not been an effort by Kolab Systems, but he did it in his own personal time as a member of the community.
That was not clear to me up to this point. One reason might be that the release post only mentioned other people from the community with special thanks, but Jeroen was not mentioned.
I thought the work of Jeroen was taken for granted because he did it in his time for Kolab Systems.
In fact, he should have been mentioned as first to thank for a new release in the past years...
Now that I think of it, sometimes it was Jeroen himself who wrote the release post, and yes it looks strange when you express gratitude to yourself...

So hereby I want to thank Jeroen for the hard work on the past releases, in the name of the community!

Fact is that Jeroen cannot participate in the release as much as in the past.
He concentrates on working on continuous delivery and deployment rather than a release.

So I guess we as the community should start an effort to get Kolab Community Edition 3.5 ready for a release. We will still rely on Jeroen for tagging the upstream packages like libkolab, libkolabxml, libcalendaring, kolab-webadmin etc. We also will need his advice, and will also still be using the infrastructure (OBS) provided by Kolab Systems. (Thanks to Kolab Systems for that!)

I suggest we aim for a release of Kolab 3.5 for February 2015. That way we could get back to the half year release cycle.

I will post separate emails to the developers list about more technical details.

This will be a community effort.
Each of us has other responsibilities and projects besides of Kolab as well.
Please reply on the mailing lists what you think and how you can contribute! There is the packaging for various OS, testing, writing release notes, describing the upgrade path, updating the manual, and probably more.

Thanks,
   Timotheus