I screwed up the release

Falkon 25.04

In the release of Falkon 25.04.0 is a feature to show the bookmark or history item address in the statusbar when the mouse hovers over the item (in menu, toolbar, sidebar). I thought I tested everything, but I did not. I did not test the folders in the bookmark toolbar. Before the release, there was a bug report was this exact issue, which I thought I resolved, but I only resolved a part of it.

So after the release was done, the bug was reopened and I managed to fix it fully this time (I hope), but the release was already made. I am not sure how should I approach this, so I pushed the fix and made an announcement on the mailing lists (distributions - for the distribution packagers to apply the patch, falkon - for users to know there is a potential issue. Even with this, there were instances where people and distribution packagers were not aware of the issue. I got a mail that this should also be on the main page as an article about the issue. I thought the mails are enough, since all people who can do something about this should be following one of the mailing lists.

Falkon 24.12

This release went mostly smoothly, but with the comming of Qt6.9 there was a change in the graphic backend which could be used. The implementation of Falkon “Use hardware acceleration” option sets the backend option for QtWebEngine/Chromium backend. This causes Falkon to crash with rendering ŕelated errors.

The fix for this was implemented during the Falkon 24.12 lifecycle but was never cherry picked for this release, because I thought it is not relevant, it will just work (right??). While I had other things to worry about, I totally missed this crucial detail and with a final release of Qt6.9 Falkon 24.12 started crashing when hardware acceleration was enabled.I did not report on this issue anywhere, I only mentioned a possible fix in the bug reports and that is how I found what the issue with Qt6.9 is as well.

This is one of the reasons why I do not like setting chromium options (flags) and rather opt to wait for official Qt API to bring some feature. I do not have will to play with all these flags. Users can set them on their own and thus the responsibility is on them.

Conclusion

So I kind of screwed up two major releases of Falkon and introduced multiple bugs and under reported them. Is this the price to pay for a progress?