Massive Konqueror Regression

[C. Michailidis]

This is gonna be a kinda long one, so get ready!  Here's the way I see it...

Although I like KDE quite a bit I can understand user frustration.  Let's face it, the KDE project is pretty big already and sometimes it just seems like anything with a K in front of the application name all of a sudden gets imported into the source tree.  Perhaps this mailing list should be named kde-quantity instead of quality.

I typically use KDE on my freebsd workstation and it seems like every time I notice a bump in the version I actually fear upgrading (a fair bit).  For one thing, I usually build my ports from source and building KDE takes forever.  That aside, inevitably when KDE gets updated it seems like there are at least as many things that get broken as get fixed.

My recent update to kde 3.4.2 was typical.  First of all, there is still some library that is included in more than one kde port.  I hate waiting an hour or more to build kde-base only to see that it tries to over write a file from kde-lib (or w/e, i can't quite remember the details now) and then have the upgrade back out.  Isn't modularity taught in first year curriculums anymore?

Next, I go to sync my visor w/ kpilot and I notice that Kpilot crashes every time I click on 'memos' or 'addresses'.  Kpilot sync's fine with the visor, but I can no longer view my memos... It's really aggravating.

How about this... I can configure the panel to go on my left display, or my right display, or stretched across both displays, but I can't have it mirrored on every display!  How could no one have thought of that??  It's just a natural extension of the already occuring pattern.  There is some salvation, I can actually add another panel.  However, since I just want an exact copy of the first panel I still lose out; I need to manually duplicate the first panel, and some applets (think ksystray) won't show up on more than one panel... ugh!!

The list goes on... after an update to 3.4.1 I noticed that whenever I clicked on a link in an email from within Kontact, konqueror took fooooooreeeevvveeerrrr to load the page.  This problem 'magically' vanished after the last portupgrade I did.

For those of you about to tell me that I should submit bug reports, you can forget it.  Maybe I'll submit a report, maybe I won't... the point is, a lot of bug reports COULD be submitted.

I'm pretty sure that when Mr. van Hoose says "KDE's development needs to be stopped" he means that at one point the kde code has to freeze and only accept bug fixes, not new features.  I know that many 'larger' projects tend to have multiple source code branches to work from.  Is there such a thing as this in kde-land?  Should there be?  I tend to think so.  If there isn't, the KDE team needs to step up to the plate and focus on this.  Otherwise the "stupid user" complaints will just keep growing.  After all... you don't want stupid users (effectively) using code directly out of a developers sandbox.  The reigns need to be pulled in a bit.  Some users don't want to be guinea pigs for the latest and greatest stuff.  In fact, most users (especially corporate types) simply want a robust, refined, and highly usable solution without the bells, whistles, and eye-candy.  Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the release engineering process being used; Honestly, I don't even know of a stable/dev branch of kde, nor have I ever seen any beta vrs production releases of it.  Almost every high-quality project has at least a 'stable' and 'dev' version, a lot of the code can be common, sometimes useful things get backported, sometimes bugs get introduced, but the nice thing is that it offers the software conisseur a choice.  In my opinion, more choice = more power = happier users. 

As far as I can tell, there is only one kde right now (the latest) and it really does a good job of defining "love/hate relationship".  Bottom line... the KDE culture may need to change from 'wanting everything + the kitchen sink, yesterday' to 'lets polish some brass, iron some wrinkles, and clean up rough edges'.  Otherwise, I just may switch back to windowmaker ;-)

If you see the KDE project solidify a reputation for being unstable and not usuable in the 'real world', don't be too surprised.

Signed,
a cranky old man