Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Good stuff and well thought-out... Especially the recognition that app 
developers are not lib developers, which makes all the difference.

But since I have already entered the public discussion, I'm going to going to 
reiterate my two cents here.

* While it's certainly still possible to do cool stuff with Qt 3, that's no 
argument. It's still possible to do cool stuff with Motif, too. For some 
problems Qt3 doesn't cut it, and I happen to be very interested in some of 
these problems.

* KDE-the-Desktop and KDE-the-development framework are two different beasts. 
A Qt4-based development framework can be very useful withouth Plasma and all 
the other wonderful kennings we've been coining for the past year.

* A quick release of the development framework followed by a later release of 
the desktop would fit my personal agenda very well. If there are one or two 
releases of KDE application sets for 3.5 in between, fine. But KOffice isn't 
going to be among them, as far as I have any say in the matter.

My ideal roadmap (excluding application and desktop environment releases) 
would be:

* usable kdelibs4 by mid-March. KOffice porting starts. We'll do the text 
layout thing and fix embedding.

* I don't care about having to do some keeping-up during the KOffice porting 
effort.

* September/October: kdelibs4 is sufficiently stable that it is possible to 
release a beta of KOffice that depends on it. This beta will run just fine in 
a KDE 3.5 desktop, perhaps with some limitations like no dcop or so. 

* November/December KOffice 2.0 is released, based on kdelibs4 and available 
on X11, Windows and OS X.


However: I'm horribly afraid of a late release of KDE-the-desktop, though. 
It's going to cost us whatever mind and marketshare we have left if 
KDE4-the-desktop will take two years, even if we do a kde-apps-are-cool 
release. This year is going to be really interesting.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi
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