Tagging Freeze in Effect

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 28 October 2007, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 04:46:02PM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > if it isn't painfully obvious by now, people remain silent and aren't
> > sufficiently motivated to start the last push work until these things
> > happen. interesting human behaviour,
>
> while this is true to a big degree, there is simply no way to deny that
> this "beta" cycle was so far *way* below anything we've seen before.
>
> you know, it is KDE, not KE. people realize that "something" fundamental
> is missing and simply don't pursue further.

this is another, though rather tangential, issue of interest. we've 
*completely* outgrown our name. the D in KDE is no longer our central product 
but *one* of our products.

to illustrate: koffice is a "KDE project" by any measure ..... except that it 
isn't tied to the D part of KDE in any way, shape or form. in fact, the 
KOffice team has in the past tried to make this explicit to the point of 
*distancing* themselves from KDE-the-project publicly so that people wouldn't 
get confused about "KOffice requires you log into the KDE desktop".

with win and mac being added to the list of platforms, this only goes even 
further.

the implication? not one letter in "KDE" as it was originally coined ("Kool 
Desktop Environment") applies to the project anymore. this is actually really 
cool because it shows how much things have grown and changed, how flexible 
the technology has become and pervasive the demand for what everyone here 
does is.

as we start exploring worlds such as UMPC devices (or even smaller) and media 
centers, we'll get even further away from the D in KDE. it won't just 
be "it's another desktop the app runs on" but "there is no desktop".

this is ultimately very cool, but something we all ought to be internalizing.

and this is from someone who works primarily on the D part of things. 
self-marginalization at its best? ;)

> playing "psychological tricks" with names won't do any good, just
> destroy credibility.

and you know what? by the time 4.1 is out nobody will even care. most won't 
even remember properly. i offer 2.0 and 3.0 as evidence for that.

understanding how the minds of your audience tend to work can be very useful.

> we should still consider doing a gamma release at some point to
> say "we really mean it now" without trying to redefine terminology on a
> big scale.

elsewhere in threads i've already covered the difference between feature and 
time releases. i agree that from a feature POV it's not good; from a time 
POV, which is really all we have left right now, it's what is needed.

> and, fwiw, i also think that releasing the development platform before
> the desktop would be silly. we have enough embarrassing cases already
> where app devels simply work around lib bugs instead of fixing or even
> reporting them - we don't need to force this situation additionally.

examples, please, so we can fix them. (and not just from Ossi here, but 
everyone who knows about such 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
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