Tagging Freeze in Effect

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 26 October 2007, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 09:28:35AM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Friday 26 October 2007, Germain Garand wrote:
> > > Concerns were raised, and up to know gleefully ignored, that the
> > > quality of the development platform is not any better than that of
> > > the "full blown" KDE.
> >
> > while i disagree, perhaps i'm just missing something. what
> > specifically in the dev platform are you concerned about?
> >
> > printing is still settling out though it seems to approach a
> > conclusion fairly quickly here,
>
> maybe *i*'m missing something now, but in my book that's a clear
> criterion for alpha status. you know, beta means that everything is in
> place and mostly working. this applies to libs (and their apis) and
> applications alike.

more of the disconnect comes to the surface. this is good.

we're trying to get this puppy out there, and we're trying to do it in a 
timely manner (which we've really already failed at, tbh). so we can either 
continue to try and do some feature based release target[1] and really fail 
utterly, or we can go for a point in time and do the best to get there.

in that sense, we're (ab)using these terms to mark milestones towards that 
point in time rather than a point in feature status. we're using those words 
because they are familliar.

we could just as easily have used terms from some other system of creation 
rather than software. but arguing that the words don't mean what they mean 
when we use them to mean what we are doing is ... daft. it's circular, 
actually. so let's not.

> fwiw, the comparison with the linux model is completely flawed. a 2.6.x
> linux release has a whopping *two weeks* feature addition phase and
> six to eight weeks stabilization phase - their beta phase is four times
> as long as the alpha phase. and anything bigger has a pretty extended
> (from linus' tree's pov) pre-alpha life in separate trees - heck, those
> trees often have their own alpha, beta and even stable releases before
> linus even considers them.

obviously we can't do an 8 year beta phase. reality is often a bitch. the 
question is whether we're a bitch back or if we simply deal with it.

we also don't have the decentralized system the kernel has. something that is 
a topic of much conversation these days within the kde community. but again, 
reality is what it is today and we get to deal with it (or fail).

and all of that is somewhat besides the issue; my point was, by means of 
analogy, the kernel team usually releases dot-oh's that are not nearly what 
some on this list are trying to make kde4 dot-oh into. that was the pure 
extent of the analogy, nothing more. taking any analogy beyond the point of 
similarity is rediculous, so let's not do so and turn this into a useless 
discussion. 

thank you.

[1] which is irrational since we've never defined those target features except 
with vague "it will feel right" or "we'll know it when we see it" sort of 
things

-- 
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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20071026/058bfacb/attachment.sig>