[Kde-games-devel] Panic: KDE 4.13 schedule too tight for me

[Ian Wadham]

I am writing to KDE Games, hoping that Albert Astals Cid can advise me.

I just checked the schedule for KDE 4.13 and I see that most of the
freeze dates are on 26 February 2014 and that is only 9 days away!
Also there seems to be no soft v. hard freeze this time.

The final release is 16 April 2014, about two months later.

Looking back over the schedules, it seems that KDE 4.11 had a total
cycle of about 6 months after KDE 4.10 release (Feb 6 2013 to
Aug 14 2013), whereas KDE 4.12 and KDE 4.13 have had about
4 months each (Aug 14 2013 to Dec 18 2013 and 16 April 2014).

A 4 month cycle leaves not much time for application development
IMHO.  I realise that library and desktop resources are very likely
going into KDE 5 and that there is probably not much left to do in
KDE 4 library and desktop, but what about KDE 4 *applications*?

Currently I have been working very hard on Palapeli development
in the mistaken belief that we still had 6 month cycles and that I had
4 months or more in which to complete the design and development
phase of the work.

Now I find that I have had about 2 months for design and development,
and those 2 months are very nearly up!

What can I do?  I do not think I can meet the 26 Feb freeze, but
neither do I wish to throw away all the work I have done so far
on Palapeli.  The Message, Feature and Documentation freezes
are my main worry.

I might be able to freeze the descriptions of the features by 26 Feb,
but I doubt if I can finish writing the code by then.  Also I am finding
that the features "evolve" a little as I write the code and try it out on
large puzzles.  For example, I am now triggering the "close-up"
zooming feature with a mouse button rather than the space bar.
That is a small coding change, but a bigger change in UI, error
messages and documentation.

It also seems unlikely I can continue the work in KDE 5 and Qt 5.
Three changes of library and desktop are enough for me and I am
getting too old for another one ...  The transition to KDE 4 and Qt 4
nearly killed me … :-)

So what are my options?

All the best, Ian W.