[Kolab-devel] Plans for Kolab 3.5 community release

[Brady, Mike]

On 2015-11-17 20:20, Timotheus Pokorra wrote:
> 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

Timotheus,

Thank you for sharing this.

I also did not understand that Jeroen was doing this in his own time and 
not on behalf on Kolab Systems and would like to add my thanks for his 
efforts.

Is there an explanation somewhere on what the work flow is for Kolab 
Community Edition? I mean that there Phabricator, Bugzilla and OBS.  To 
my own discredit I have never understood how all the tools hang together 
to a get release done and how, or even if community fixes are pushed 
back up stream.

How can I help?  I am not a developer, but have been known to dabble in 
Python when I have to. I could relatively easily do
  1) Package testing on current versions of Centos.
  2) Help with documentation.  I have tried to do this in the past 
(sometime ago now), but every time I tried to access OBS it was down, so 
(again to my discredit) I gave up.

I guess at a minimum I am going to have to get access to and understand 
how to use OBS before I can be of any use.

Thanks

Mike