Massive Konqueror Regression

[David van Hoose]

Hi.. Actually all I want to see is some regression tests that the KDE team
runs on a production box to confirm their code works for a release. Too
often the release seems like a buggy snapshot that sometimes doesn't even
compile.

-David

-----Original Message-----
From: C. Michailidis [mailto:dinom at balstonresearch.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2005 1:39 PM
To: kde-quality at kde.org
Subject: Re: Massive Konqueror Regression


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

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