Plans for Kolab 3.5 community release

[Timotheus Pokorra]

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