Release Criteria

[Roberto Selbach Teixeira]

On Thursday 14 November 2002 16:54, George Staikos wrote:
>      As every release of KDE approaches, I always think to myself: "What
> criteria defines the code in CVS as 'ready for release'?"  To my knowledge,
> there really isn't much other than the common consensus that we generally
> work with.  I don't think this is a good idea anymore.

I second that. Last night I was thinking about it myself. I was testing KDE 
and fixing some small bugs and I thought that there is no real organised 
process to warrant the quality of KDE - meaning that a lot of people try to 
check for bugs, but usually on an individual and non-coordinated way. This 
checklist is indeed very very helpful.

> I'm sure that there will be some documentation and i18n feedback too.  I
> don't know enough about those processes to insult the team members with an
> attempt at determining what makes their work "ready to ship".

Since I share my life with the Brazilian translation team coordinator, I think 
I can say something about the subject and risk sleeping in the couch ;)

Translations are even more important than most realise. Often I find small 
translation problems in KDE, but sometimes there are some really nasty ones. 
For the end user, a bad translation can ruin a great interface. The most 
common problem is literal translations. This is something we should all be 
very alert about. Most of us don't even read the text anymore and thus we 
tend to let those bugs escape. The checklist should be used to verify that at 
least in the most visible areas the translations are ok.

Also, there should be a minimum percentage of messages translated to some 
language for it to be released with KDE. Mixing untranslated strings with 
translated ones looks quite unprofessional. I think this is already done by 
Thomas Diel but this should be in the checklist nonetheless.

	Roberto.