Future of KDE Development

[Torsten Rahn]

> > How about keeping kdelibs and large parts of kdebase feature frozen, and
> > have a 3.5 release only containing updated apps: kdepim, kdevelop,
> > quanta, kdegraphics (and konqy+khtml+kjs) ?
> ...and (user) documentation? And WhatsThis-completeness? And speed
> optimizations (if there are any to be done)? And an ambitious goal
> to bring down the current open bugzilla count to half the current?
> And "polishing" menues, UIs, artwork?  (I am aware that this doesnt
> sound very "sexy" to most who write KDE code...)

As a kde-artist member I'd like to add my share, too:
Currently Janet Theobroma and the kde-contest team are preparing an Icon 
contest which intends to add and replace as many icons as possible by high 
quality icons for the next KDE release. This contest is targeted to happen 
quite soon. An obvious reward would be that the winning icons will be 
included with the next KDE release. But of course we can't promise this if 
the next release is more than six months away. Of course we could always put 
the winning icons into a 3.4.x release but I feel that it would be more 
appropriate to have it as a part of a 3.5 release.

Apart from that I support Stephans suggestion to have a KDE 3.5 release so 
that all docwriters, usability-engineers, designers, translators, etc. will 
keep working and won't loose interest in the KDE project because they have to 
idle around. 
And of course this would give us more time for the developers to work on KDE 
4.0: While preparing a 3.5 release might take about 4-5 months programmers 
can use this time to work on porting kdelibs/base and cleaning up the API 
already. Once this would be done and KDE 3.5 is released there would be 
additional 8-9 months left to port applications, do bugfixing etc. 
So in total KDE 4.0 work would cover about 13-14 months which wouldn't be 
noted by the public at all. If we would work for 14 months w/o releasing any 
further software in the meantime then this would at least create bad PR for 
our project and hurt our project severely. 

That's why I vote for a KDE 3.5 release.

Greetings,
Torsten