KDE 3.5.1 and 3.6

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Saturday 03 December 2005 02:10, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> >What is the state of "freeze" on branches/KDE right now?
> 
> All of the branches on branches/KDE are frozen for good. That means no new 
> features and no new user-visible messages, but bug fixes (including 
> usability and accessibility ones) are allowed.
> 
> >There are a number of changes I'd like to make in kdeaccessibility/kttsd
> > and I'd rather not wait 1 to 2 years to make them publicly available.
> 
> >
> >There are also a number of accessibility changes that ought to be made
> > in kdelibs.  See the KOffice Accessibility Assessment here for details:
> >
> >http://accessibility.kde.org/reports/
> >
> >Is there going to be a 3.6 release and can I begin working on them in
> >branches/KDE?
> 
> No KDE 3.6 release is planned.
> 
> >I suppose the answer comes down to: is anyone willing (and able) to be
> > the release coordinator for a 3.6 release. 
> 
> What we will do is have 3.5.x releases. That's for certain.
> 
> If, on the other hand, you introduce important changes to 3.5 that require 
> a break from message- and/or feature-freeze, we could have a special 
> release. We should target it for sometime around 6-9 months from now.
> 
> I wouldn't call it 3.6 because many applications have started moving off 
> to KDE4 and Qt4 codebases and development has stopped on the KDE3 code. 
> It wouldn't be a full KDE release.
> 
> There are, however, applications that would benefit from another release 
> (Kopete 0.12 comes to mind, khtml and the PIM suite would probably go as 
> well). They could do releases of their own, though.

I think it could be a good idea to have another intermediate "release"
(call it "3.6" or any name you want; maybe an "Extragear Release"?) on 
the long way to 4.0. It could focus on featuring all the well working 
extragear stuff, based on basically unchanged kdelibs, plus some agreed
upon new features like the ones Gary wants to implement.

The main purposes would be
 - "marketing", especially providing a coordinated PR to all the individual
   apps which at other times do it all on their own (I'm thinking about the
   wonderful stuff we have like k3b, amarok, taskjuggler, digikam, kimdaba,
   gwenview, kopete, quanta, kommander....  
 - and bridging the long wait for our loyal users, give them something new
   to use and evangelize about.

But this all lives or dies with how the extragear app maintainers feel
about this idea.