Tagging Freeze in Effect

[Germain Garand]

Le Samedi 27 Octobre 2007 18:00, Tom Albers a écrit :
> Op za 27 okt 2007 17:38 schreef u:
> > > Please mail release-team mailinglist with your concerns and be a lot
> > > more verbose.
> >
> > all right, I'll start that process, but I'm dissapointed.
> > This list shouldn't need to be told the sky is blue or that the Emperor
> > as no clothes.
> >
> > Look, the beta process didn't work.
>
> It's so cool making those statements and not backing it up by actual facts.
> You keep telling us we suck without actually telling us what sucks. The
> comparisation with the Emperor does not hold by the way, the emperor needed
> to be told that he had no clothes, just like the release-team could believe
> something is rc-quality and it is not. So please enlighten us.

I don't know why you seem to take that as some kind of attack of the release 
team's work. It certainly is not.

I think you did a great job with the beta cycle, and development is now much 
more alive and kicking indeed.

What you couldn't do is force users to actually use the betas and *in this 
sense* am I stating that the beta process has failed. We don't have enough 
feedback. I don't have the impression I'm bringing any big news by saying 
that, am I?

> > The desktop was not ready, so users did not report obvious low level
> > bugs.
>
> Ah, so now you are back to the desktop. We all agree that's in beta state
> for now.

as Maksim stated, I'm referring to the fact that you can't test the underlying 
libraries in the real world without a decently working desktop, which we 
didn't have until recently.

> We are constantly changing it, adapting to info we
> receive and the state as we see it. At the moment kdelibs is at rc state
> and kdebase in beta state. Please explain in detail what is bureaucratic
> about it.

Once again, I'm grateful about your work and wouldn't want to see it *spoiled* 
by the release of an early RC that's not a correct reflection of the state of 
the software.

I was on my way to fill bug reports and point you to them, but I suck at 
writing bug reports, so I'll just make a few points here:

- khtml as seen much work and needs more testing. 
There are most pressing painting issues yet to solve, a few nasty and frequent 
crashes in inline content we are working on, the image loading library as 
seen major rework by Maksim, as well as the canvas implementation, and needs 
real world testing. XMLHTTPRequest seem to have some issues with the 
underlying kio jobs and sometimes fail to work god knows why. We need reports 
and testcases. I could go on and on for a further 20 lines.

- IO slaves have bad habit of sometime hanging around sucking out 100% of the 
cpu (in waitForIncomingTask says sysprof). Sometimes content is not 
completely served or connection is lost. I don't know much about IO slaves, 
but I can see they are not stable for daily use.

- kdesu does not work with normal su. While that may be a design decision(?!), 
it reports erroneously not being able to dialog with "su" while the console 
output talk about "sudo", then the application hangs and is covered with 
garbage.

- the data: protocol does not work.

- Phonon cannot use alsa here. Though it used to work OK during earlier phases 
ad I've been a happy Phonon user in KHTML.

- Sonnet just crashes when using it's Dialog

#15 0xb710b141 in qt_message_output (msgType=QtFatalMsg, 
    buf=0xbfff9dd0 "ASSERT: \"i >= 0 && i < size()\" in 
file /opt/kde4-trunk/include/QtCore/qstring.h, line 638") at 
global/qglobal.cpp:2160
#16 0xb710b4d1 in qFatal (msg=0xb7206aec "ASSERT: \"%s\" in file %s, line %d")
    at global/qglobal.cpp:2391
#17 0xb710ad0a in qt_assert (assertion=0xb7b5d663 "i >= 0 && i < size()", 
    file=0xb7b5d3b0 "/opt/kde4-trunk/include/QtCore/qstring.h", line=638)
    at global/qglobal.cpp:1919
#18 0xb7ab5583 in Sonnet::Filter::wordAtPosition (this=0x8dab5d8, pos=6)
    at qstring.h:638


On a personal level, I think with a "Beta" label, we can manage.
With an "RC" label, you'll just turn away our most faithful users and affect 
the reputation of our coders.

Greetings,
Germain