future versions (Re: [kde-announce] Announcing KDE 3.2)

[Waldo Bastian]

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On Wed February 4 2004 11:26, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 February 2004 11:00, Brad Hards wrote:
> > I see KDE 3.3 as a shorter release (perhaps 6 months?), with fewer new
> > features than KDE 3.2 provided (that is, KDE 3.3 - KDE 3.2 < KDE 3.2 -
> > KDE 3.1 in features terms).
>
> As I said before I'd like to keep an eye on 3.2.1 before doing too much
> future thinking :)
>
> For me there are two things that would justify a quick KDE 3.3 release for
> me: - Cleaning up kcontrol in introducing the long awaited theme manager
> and moving out the app specific modules (you know where I am, Scott :) -
> Profile enhancements for konqueror, that were floating around shortly
> before release (#74097 is just another incarnation of that wish)
>
> I haven't heard about the Qt atk bridge again (and afaik it's not part of
> the Qt 3.3 changelog), that would have been another reason.
>
> But 6 months is unrealistic. You end up with a release in august and that's
> exactly the time where many of the nothern hemisphere are relaxing in the
> sun and don't care about hacking. And less than 6 months is pretty
> unrealistic too, taking that we spent roughly 3 months in feature freeze
> for 3.2.

I would like to see a KDE 3.3 targeted for late 2004Q3, let's say early 
oktober. In parallel to that I think there should be a KDE 3.3-experimental 
branch where framework technology for KDE 4 can be developed such as the atk 
bridge integration and various freedesktop technologies such as the shared 
mimetypes, DBUS and perhaps a single shared audio API.

Then after KDE 3.3 gets released we should be able to fold these technologies 
back into HEAD while they are relatively stable already and aim for KDE 4.0 
in 2005Q2 (e.g. may) or if we need more time 2005Q3 (e.g. oktober)

Looking back at KDE 3.2 then I see two new technologies, the new menu handling 
and the kwin changes, and both of these brought quite a lot of unexpected 
complications with them, so if we want to introduce more of such changes for 
KDE 4.0 then I think it is absolutely vital that we start very early with 
that. By doing the bulk of this in parallel with KDE 3.3 I think we can keep 
the disruption for application developers to a minimum. 

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SUSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com
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