KDE4 release discussion, Was: KIO::NetAccess static methods question

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 25 October 2007, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> Le jeudi, 25 octobre 2007 11:36, Aaron J. Seigo a écrit :
> > On Thursday 25 October 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > personaly, i do not expect kde 4.0 to be a release that comes
> > preinstalled on computer systems or a release that one would put out into
> > production deployments.
>
> I can see your standing, but I think we so much spoke of KDE4 (notice the
> notation) and how wonderful will be, that people _are indeed_ expecting
> that KDE 4.0 (notice the notation) be installable on production systems.

.. and what i'm saying is that:

- as i travel around and talk to people, that does not seem to be the case at 
all (e.g. we're inventing a lot of this 'problem" ourselves)

- we can manage those expectations just fine. k-c-d should worry less about 
public perception.

that last point is the most important thing.

> > this is not because of a failure of KDE 4.0 or anything like that. 4.0
> > should simply not be that kind of release at all. period. it should be
> > something that lets us get that working draft out into the hands of
> > people who are closest to us, but not us. emphasis on "working" but also
> > on "draft".
>
> Then we should probably call it (not symbolically but conceptually) "almost
> 4.0" (as 3.9 seem to scare developers and testers away...)

doing that doesn't make much a difference. if we call it "almost 4.0" we don't 
get the users we need to reach with this sort of release, we don't get the 
cred for doing a release and we grow more timid ourselves.

it's "deep breath, big balls" time.

> > we seem to have gotten so full of ourselves and so scared of releasing
> > something that isn't "ready for the enterprise" that we seem to have
> > forgotten that process.
>
> We shouldn't forget the raised expectations we created in the userbase with
> the record of the last 11 years. _That_'s more problematic. As a project

indeed, we've become self-important to the point where we feel we can't do 
what we need to because we're so vital to our users and they would never 
understand us. we need to relax a bit, get our perspective back.

> > if you are concerned about what the public perception is, first step is
> > to stop being worried yourself.
>
> That's a great thing to express, with which I agree completely. Do we try
> it with 4.0?

personally, i hope so.

> we're rather deeply caught in the hype machine.

indeed. that loss of perspective is not good. in many ways this cycle has been 
our first with this sort of attention and public display of intentions, and 
perhaps we're just not sure how to deal with that. the answer, imho, is that 
we ignore the "hype machine" when we do our thing (releasing software), 
trusting that when we do our thing then good things happen.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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