PA4

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 22.07.2013 18:49, Marco Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
> at Akademy i promised we would have talked about pa4 after akademy and 
> here it
> is ;)

[snip]

> one thing that may be tried is to try to change the installer from 
> btrfs to
> ext4 to see if it helps a bit, otherwise exopc/wetab support may have 
> to be
> removed...

In don't think that the Wetab/ExoPC are an important market for us 
(given that they're old, oversized and crappy). The only problem is that 
it's the only device some members of the team currently have. If someone 
would give everyone a different device which runs PA fine, though, that 
shouldn't be much of a problem *hint hint*

> on other things, at akademy during the bof something that was suggested 
> is to
> disable the recommendations panel and the location applet
>  http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/PA4
> 
>  sincedoesn't seem much usable and has only one plugin...
> personally, on one part I don't like removing features we had, on the 
> other
> part i'm all for simplification (especially when it can save some 
> megabyte of
> ram) but I'm keeping opinions for myself so far, so let's discuss it.

For me, simplification isn't the most important reason for removing it. 
The most important reason is that users don't like useless features and 
thus certainly not many would miss this one. AFAIR it was explicitly 
removed for PA2 and only reappeared in PA3 by accident, so re-removing 
it is basically a bugfix.

> another thing may be the video, that i'm not sure if still ok or should 
> be
> changed, if we still want an introductory video.

Unless we somehow manage to get the in-situ tutorials we've been 
planning to do in for PA4, which is most certainly not going to happen, 
we definitely need an updated intro video. We have tons of features 
which are simply not discoverable and have to be shown to users at least 
once. We'll first have to get an overview of what those features are and 
then create a new video which explains all of them.

> other than that, modulo proximity blindness, it looks fine for me on 
> devices
> != wetab

We definitely need structured testing. With the last few RCs, I always 
had several problems (e.g. with the RC from Sunday running live from the 
USB stick on my Wetab, new files were still not being indexed (tested 
with a text file saved in KWrite), an absolute release blocker). I don't 
know if that one's fixed by now, but I'm pretty sure it's not the only 
problem left in there.
There are ideas for testing tasks somewhere on this mailing list and we 
have to test these on all devices which we consider "supported".
There are still quite a few bugs open in my release blocker list as 
well:
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=grave&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=crash&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&product=Active&list_id=564029
Most of these only come up when you try to actually use PA, not just 
give it a quick try, but there are nevertheless pretty critical and some 
of them seem to not even have been looked at. We definitely need to go 
over that list together and see which ones of them are fixable, where we 
can do a workaround and which we might have to live with (only as a last 
resort and after careful consideration).
Since PA4 will be shipped with Vivaldi and it is (was?) supposed to be 
an "LTS release", there are still quite some things to do.

A problem is that I am at a conference this week and since I won't have 
a good enough Wifi to download an image anyway (and the last RC didn't 
really work for me), I haven't even taken my wetab with me.
So I can only start testing next week, but even with the current bug 
list, there is probably still enough to do.

Cheers,
Thomas