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

[Maksim Orlovich]

> On 10/26/07, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Friday 26 October 2007, Maksim Orlovich wrote:
>> > Because what we ship is a matter of our integrity. We should hold
>> > ourselves to the highest standards, should we not?
>>
>> plurium interrogationum.
>
> ... which brought me to a very intersting page, which (besides many
> other things) stated:
> Loaded questions are used in this way to slip claims into rhetoric
> without the burden of proving them, or the necessity of taking
> responsibility for unproven assertions.

May be you need to look up "rhetorical question" instead; it's just a
stylistic form of a declarative sentence: "We should hold ourselves to the
highest standards". I will not attempt to prove it, since I consider it an
axiom.

>> No one is talking about it having to be as stable as 3.5.8. We're
>> talking
>> about it not being clearly broken in many spots.
>
> Nobody is saying we should release something which is still clearly
> broken.

What people have been saying is that we can call the current state of
trunk a release candidate. Think of what that means. A "release
candidate". That's supposed to be something that one thinks is ready for
release, but just wants to give it some testing. And if this is close to a
release, the release will be an utter embarrassment. Thank goodness it got
named Beta 4, that at least somewhat approaches reality.

> We release it as soon as it isn't. You just assume that means
> it can't be released for at least 6 months, while I assume we can get
> it out before the end of the year if we're just a bit reasonable.

Did I ever say anything about any specific time frame? I am claiming that
I am seeing way too many problems for this stage of the release schedule,
and I am hence concerned that we may not be able to ship a desktop of
quality I would consider adequate by the date stated in the schedule.
This concern is amplified by the release team's naming of things, which I
feel did not adequately reflect reality, and hence I am not certain
they are monitoring the situation enough to avoid releasing something
just on inertia.

Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised and things will improve quickly, and
perhaps it just happened that I keep stumbling on bugs at a
non-representative rate, but as far as I can see, a KDE4 that I would
consider sufficiently good is not likely by the end of the year, unless
someone clones DFaure. 3 times.

-Maks