Exception for Dolphin - KFileMetadataWidget

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi everyone,

thanks for your comments and sorry for the late reply.

2012/12/23 Sebastian Kügler:
> Hi Vishesh,
>
> On Saturday, December 22, 2012 15:26:10 Vishesh Handa wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Frank Reininghaus
>> <frank78ac at googlemail.com> wrote: If many people thought that the benefits
>> of the new widget outweigh the risks, I would say "let's merge it" - I
>> don't want to be blamed by future users of KDE 4.10 for holding back useful
>> things if there is no good reason for it. But at the moment, it seems that
>> there are more people who are worried about the risks, so I feel that it
>> should
>> better wait until KDE 4.11.
>>
>> From what I have noticed most people just don't respond, and that is taken
>> as a sign of acceptance. So one cannot really infer that there are more
>> people who are worried about the risks. Just that 2 people who disagree
>> have raised their voice.
>>
>> Is there something I can do to reduce these risks?
>>
>> From what I see there are 3 use cases -
>>
>> 1. Using it when Nepomuk enabled
>> 2.1. Using it when Nepomuk is disabled
>> 2.2. Using it when Nepomuk is enabled but the file has no meta-data
>>
>> So, the concern of using the widget in unknown ways doesn't really come into
>> play.
>>
>> I hope I'm not being rude. I just really really want to get this widget into
>> 4.10. Otherwise I'm going to have to spend 2-3 days (maybe even more?)
>> fixing up the old deprecated Nepomuk code and the KFileMetadataWidget. I
>> rather focus on other things.
>
> Understandable, and in principle I agree. The user in me even wants this to go
> in, but my experience as release manager says otherwise. We're more than a
> month past feature freeze, and we have those freezes for a good reason:
> stability, being able to test code and iterate a few times over them.
>
> Also, we have been bitten by this kind of last minute changes in the past,
> repeatedly, and especially by Nepomuk (though not exclusively).
>
> That's why I'm so hesitant about this change. Ultimately, I'd leave the
> decision to Frank, but seeing he's also not convinced, I think we should just
> postpone this merge to 4.11, as sour as this might be.

I agree with Sebastian - the freezes are there for a reason. I
appreciate all offers to help with testing in the remaining time until
the 4.10.0 release, but if that was really enough to make sure that
there are no regressions, then we could just drop the betas and
release a single RC in the future. However, past experience shows that
the user feedback that we get for the 4 unstable releases before each
4.x.0 release helps to find many annoying bugs, but is still not
enough to prevent that a few regressions make it into 4.x.0. Yes, we
do have 4.x.1 and further bug fix releases, but in the end, users just
don't like it when there are new bugs in 4.x.0, and I perfectly
understand that. The angry bug reports would end up in my inbox, and
the reporters would even be right because I would be responsible for
any problems if I approved the use of code that has not seen any wide
testing before RC 2.

Therefore, I think that using the new widget in Dolphin should not
happen before KDE 4.11. Users who really want to use it earlier can
just build Dolphin from source and apply the patch (which is not that
hard even if you do not use a source-based distro, just install the
kdelibs headers and then perform a few simple steps).

I also thought again about Vishesh's argument that he would "have to
spend 2-3 days (maybe even more?)" if we do not use the new widget in
KDE 4.10, and I must say that I do not understand this at all. How can
can using the old widget in KDE 4.10 make the user experience worse
than in KDE 4.9 if he does not spend 2-3 days hacking on the old code?

Best regards
Frank