[Feedback] What did you do with Amarok?

[Jeff Mitchell]

Colin Guthrie wrote:
> have been 2.0, perhaps a 1.99.x series should have been the main 
> developer version for a lot longer and distros should have been 
> encouraged to not ship it as the default version. In Mandriva we did 
> ship 2.0 but also provided the 1.x series. This meant we covered the 
> bases as best we could and still please the bleeding edge addicts.
> 
> In the end, whenever you call some version x.0 people want it, whether 
> they appreciate the actual *need* or *consequences* of having it.

We had these. We had multiple betas, and multiple RCs. Eventually we got
into a super-long feature and string freeze while we worked on polishing
what we had, and while translators translated the large number of new
strings. We had to stabilize 2.0 at some point, because we had to have
this very long freeze at the time of stabilization, during which we
couldn't actually add back the features that eventually we put into 2.1.

Some distros made 1.9x available, and we had project Neon, and all sorts
of ways to build from SVN. Users had a very large amount of time to try
this out -- and some did, and some provided useful feedback, and we're
grateful for that. But a large number of users who were OK with the
caveats we gave in the release announcement didn't try it out ahead of
time because their distros simply wouldn't support it until 2.0 came
out, by which I mean no distro packages were available and in some cases
even dependencies weren't easily available. So we had a large number of
users willing to test and report that wouldn't or couldn't do so until
2.0. So that's another reason we eventually had to freeze and release,
to actually get the distros supporting it and especially its
dependencies. To boil it down: we couldn't get (many) people using it
and testing it until the distros supported it, and we couldn't get the
distros supporting it until we had a release. At some point you have to
cut the cord and do it.

When we released 2.0, the distros got the same exact information that
was given in our release announcement, which is why most of them made
2.0 available (which was good because we got more testing and bug
reporting) but held off until 2.1 on making it the default player. Most.
Not coincidentally, this is why we had far more happy non-Kubuntu 2.x
users than Kubuntu ones.

These aren't the only reasons by any means, but maybe this gives you
enough context as to our decision to release 2.0.

--Jeff

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 261 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok/attachments/20090729/b2fc82b3/attachment.sig>