"hacking the social system"

[Carlos Leonhard Woelz]

On Thu, 5 May 2005 18:52:56 +0000, "Nathan Olberding"
<nathan.olberding at gmail.com> said:
> On 5/5/05, James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org> wrote:
> > It appears that way to me.  That there should be a KDE UI Standards
> > "Gate Keeper" to validate conformance at least some minimum level before
> > the current HEAD is migrated to the BRANCH for the next release.

Who would do the conformance testing? Not the release manager I hope.
And since we are talking about excluding an app from a release or
delaying a release because of that, why not doing the same for other
bugs, or documentation or whats this? Where do you draw the line? Do you
wait for an app to be perfect to be released? I don't think it should
delay a release more than other bugs.

That said, I agree that conformance testing is very useful and
important.

> Maybe we could start by reading up on the guidelines and rating
> applications ourselves? We could present our results to the larger
> group as a way of saying, "here's evidence of what's wrong, it
> wouldn't take much to fix it, and we'd love to help. In the future, we
> think it'd be a good idea to have this sort of scrutiny be part of the
> release process." At that point, if the study and message were well
> written and well received, someone would need to be appointed this
> workload.

Yes, a list of applications with *detailed* conformance testing would do
much in this area. A developer may not be willing to stop whatever he is
doing to fix a small issue, but may be willing fix many issues at the
same time. Also, with new guidelines for KDE 4.0, this activity may be
even more important.
 
> If someone wants to start a little project to make a one-time rating
> of KDE-app guideline-compliance, I'd love to help.

Start with a module or an app, and post the results here. Let's see how
it goes.

Cheers,

Carlos Woelz
-- 
  Carlos Leonhard Woelz
  carloswoelz at imap-mail.com