An other beta

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 11 February 2012 21:35, Cyrille Berger Skott <cberger at cberger.net> wrote:
> On Saturday 11 Feb 2012, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>> You say in Words undo and redo is broken? Disable those features.
>> Disable cut, copy and paste.
>
> I doubt you could release a word processor as stable without those features in
> 1992, and I am rather convinced that anything that call itself a word
> processor can't be released as stable (even for very early birds) in 2012. Not
> possible. RDF and changetracking can be disabled, undo/redo, cut, copy and
> paste, not possible.
>
> I tend to agree that we need to release ASAP, I don't know if one more beta is
> "ASAP"-enough. I do worry that a big refactor in the undo stack would have a
> lot of conscequences in other applications, though, and could lead to further
> delay, I assumed the sprint was a bug fixing sprint. I will let boemann and
> Pierre comment on how much changes they are planning to do.
>
> I see three alternatives:
>
> 1) we continue with the betas until word/stage are considered ready
> 2) is a variation of 1) where we branch right now
> 3) we mark in big letters that word/stage are "Technical Preview", while the
> mature and semi-mature apps (braindump, flow, karbon, kexi, krita, table) gets
> into the hands of their users

Dear All,
I discovered that for me both Cyrille and Boud make reasonable points.
I had the following though just before I realized it's a slightly
different variant of 3):

- rename Words to Words Beta or Words Preview
- also do this with whatever [if any] app is in similar situation as Words is
- codify this approach as our standard practice and while marking it
as final decision, be open about the reasoning

RFC

Background:
Our main goals are more subtle than of those office suites first
released in 90s.

By entering the 'suite' paradigm we agreed to play certain rules in
this whole game. Part of the rules form assumed users' expectations,
and thus form perception - those that we cannot freely or easily
change.

Among others, the game sets the rule where:
- TP (Technology Preview) mark for the suite declares all components as TP
- stable mark declares stability of all components; and so on
- whatever component that is not ready for the common version stamp
stays as either as:
--- unreleased (then in closed-source world it is often not even
mentioned as something existing; in open-source its state is explained
and development can be tracked, example is the state of Kexi in early
series 2)
--- or released separately as an add-on (in closed-source extra
'freeware' stamp is used often as an excuse and even promotion for the
[already released as stable] suite)

Equally important is that:
- those suites released to reach consumers
- we release to reach consumers AND contributors

The thing is:
- we of course all apreciate emphasis on quality in development of
Words, and of course see it as of top importance in many of our use
cases; same applies to all other parts of Calligra development in
similar situation
- we understand that at the moment resources cannot be added to finish
such ambitious tasks earlier, so the only currency we pay for their
quality is TIME what translates to delays
- we wouldn't like to degrade perception of 'ready' components by not
releasing them with 'stable' mark
- we cannot have partial releases because we have to reach
contributors from the day one (the first release)
- we (and our partners deploying the software) so often have no
resources to (temporarily) release 'not ready' components as add-ons
and maintain them as such (especially that these 'not ready' parts
sometimes form reusable core components technically or in assumed
users' perception)

What makes me to favor this approach? "Walking A Mile In The Users
Boots". I'd like to see that your exceptionally great contributions be
completed with great PR and marketing.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)