KDE 3.2 release cycle

[Daniel Molkentin]

On Sunday 11 May 2003 18:14, Mosfet wrote:
[On an early release date]
>Okay, I know everyone is talking about this, but I also think the KDE3.2
>release date needs to be moved up. I've been using CVS HEAD and at least for
>what I am using it is quite stable and has more than enough new
> functionality to justify a new release. I know there is a ton of things 
> people want to do but 3.2 is just a minor point release, not KDE4.0. I'm
> rather impressed with what has been done already, esp in regards to
> Konqueror and Kontact/KMail.

Right, but in this state I cannot release Kontact. We are miles away from a 
real groupware solution. That all the parts are some sort of integrated is 
mostly thanks to KParts and while it might look cool, it doesn't give us 
anything.

>The reasoning for this is while we all know what is going on and how much
>things are improving users generally don't. So we look like a slow turtle
>compared to other projects that do, (unofficial), releases with long
>changelogs every couple months. Development has been impressive, we should
>show it off either with unofficial releases or by doing stable releases more
>often.

Why? Look who our target audience is: I know there are a lot of impatient 
people (from whom most of them either live on cvs and/or apply newest stuff 
from e.g. kde-look.org anyway), but I don't think we should surrender our 
release politics to them because for the vast majority, upgrading is a pain 
in he butt (think newbies, think sysadmins who have to switch over huge 
departments, mostly involving changing a lot of configs/scripts).

Plus we really lack stuff that should be in 3.2, for example KWallet, which is 
something we really need by now, because its lack is a major inconvinience 
for our users.

[On pre-release snapshots]
>We are not very far from something that could be a stable release, 
> but even doing an unofficial release would be an improvement from the
> current process, which is a long wait between KDE3.1 and 3.2. Just
> expecting people to use CVS is not enough, they want snapshots with
> changelogs, screenshots, and other goodies. Even if the project just
> grabbed a CVS snapshot that is determined to be relatively stable and
> released it with a changelog and documentation, that would be an
> improvement.

The problem is to follow the bugreports then. Our BTS will be flooded with 
bugs that are mostly obsolete before they are sent. I know this problem from 
the Kontact prereleases quite well. There are so many bugreports that simply 
don't apply anymore 2 days after release. Yet, I have to close them.

Plus I don't see how you want to grant stablity for the snapshots. It's hard 
enought to ensure that for stable releases and betas. Esp. for KDE-PIM we 
have had some major changes in the architecture. Ensuring release stability 
after such significant changes is imho close to impossible and an extra 
effort I simply lack the time for.

The last argument is certainly the most important: Nove Hardy: We will have 
some new developments there and we have to carefully consider what should go 
into 3.2 and what into 4.0 (I'd prefer not to have a 3.3 release, but I guess 
that depends a lot on the release date of Qt 4.0 in first place).

Cheers,
  Daniel