[Kde-pim] Re: Do we need a Beta3?

[David Jarvie]

On Fri, December 10, 2010 11:13 am, Gaël Beaudoin wrote:
> Le vendredi 10 décembre 2010 11:27:14, Andras Mantia a écrit :
>> Allen Winter wrote:
>> > Howdy,
>> >
>> > Should I ask the Release Team to insert a third beta into the release
>> > schedule. The current schedule calls for the next tagging on 21 Dec to
>> > be a Release Candidate.
>> >
>> > If desired, I could ask for a 2 week extension of the schedule and we
>> > would call the 21 Dec tagging Beta3.
>>
>> Having an extension for the beta time by itself will not help. If nobody
>> fixes bugs, they won't go away. If developers cannot find time to work
>> on kdepim, that's fine, but in this case we should consider of not
>> releasing
>> kdepim together with 4.6.0. I wish we could, but releasing in its
>> current
>> state will do more harm than good, as there are obvious shortcomings
>> both in migration (very important!) and daily usage.
>
> As a user and KDE advocate, I completly agree. I've installed 4.6 beta 1
> and
> while it's miles ahead of what was in 4.5, I've reverted to 4.4.x for
> KDEPIM.
>
> I've reported several bugs [1], most of which are rather grave IMO, none
> of
> them have been fixed or commented by a developer (If I'm not wrong). This
> is
> no criticism, this to say : well, it's getting really better, but I really
> think you need to wait some more months before releasing the akonadi based
> kdepim and let developer do their magic. I've tried to keep using it, but
> the multiple current annoyances and bugs make it really hard.
>
> Having to regularly restart akonadi by hand, having the computer slow due
> to
> virtuoso/nepomul indexing, impossibility to delete some emails, others not
> shown, etc, is really hard to cope with.
>
> On the other hand, the 4.4.x branch is rock stable and pleasant to use.
> Consider giving it more time to mature.

I haven't tried kmail etc from trunk, but my experience of Akonadi with
KAlarm is that it still has significant problems. It's difficult to pin
down actual bugs, since faults seem to accumulate in the background until
eventually I notice that things have gone wrong, by which time it's too
late to see what's been going on and to know what would be worth
reporting.

As for KAlarm itself, I've recently realised that there are data migration
issues which will take at least the Christmas holidays to sort out, so
I'll have to hold the Akonadi port of KAlarm back from 4.6 if we stick to
the current schedule.

Above all, I think it's vital to wait until applications are really stable
before releasing them. KDE got a lot of bad publicity after KDE 4 was
released, justifiably IMHO - KDE 4.0 and 4.1, at least, should have been
labelled beta releases. We can't afford to have this happen again with
kdepim - this would merely reinforce the bad perception of KDE which is
still quite prevalent, and drive more people away. Even if it means
waiting until KDE 4.7 or 4.8 for the kdepim release, so be it (although I
very much hope not).

-- 
David Jarvie.
KDE developer.
KAlarm author - http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm

_______________________________________________
KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim at kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/