App duplication again (Re: new project in kdemultimedia)

[Matthias Welwarsky]

On Saturday 04 May 2002 16:38, Neil Stevens wrote:

> This is a good thing.  User feedback is important, but to have users make
> decisions is to ask them to take over some of the developer
> responsibility.  The average user is not necessarily inclined nor
> qualified to make release decisions in a way that is in line with KDE's
> goals and previous success.

Well, the user, be he average or advanced, sets the level. Users are not as 
dumb as you put them here. Of course users don't decide based on beauty of 
design or source code, but they will prefer the application that's useful for 
them.

> Further, to put these up for a vote assumes that the options in each vote
> are interchangable.  They are not.  Hetz, you and I clashed at least twice
> on whether CD Bake Oven or KreateCD would be better for KDE.  We both
> argued that one was better for a particular group of users.  So, just as
> we have KWrite and Kate for different kinds of users, why not have CD Bake
> Oven and KreateCD for different kinds of users?

The logical solution would be to throw out all of them. If the developers 
cannot decide, then let the decision be made by the users. Put them on 
apps.kde.com, watch the download counter and the rating, advertise them on 
some kde.org site and you will get a pretty good picture of user preferences. 
The winner goes into one of the core cvs modules, where it benefits from 
being translated and gaining even greater visibility.

Some times I get the impression that the only reason some applications are put 
into CVS are for the convenience of developers that grew too lazy to download 
a tarball.

regards,
	matze