Clarion call to make KDE rock! Redux.

[Orville Bennett]

Yes! It's me again. I hate reading long e-mails. They suck. So  
instead of burdening folk with one _reallly_ long e-mail I decided to  
split it into two. The topics are dissimilar enough to stand on there  
own but similar enough to go well together (a gentle prod to reading  
the other mail as well) :-)

This e-mail deals primarily with KDE 4 development, something which I  
have absolutely no involvement in by the way. But I was thinking to  
myself this morning, "Hey wouldn't it be great if we had an  
infrastructure in place to do community based QA on KDE  
releases?" (see e-mail "Clarion call to make KDE rock! Contributors  
support and blah...") And then I further went on to think, "And once  
that infrastructure is in place, wouldn't it be great to use it to  
make KDE 4 the greatest desktop environment this side of Betelgeuse?"  
The answer to both those questions in my mind, is yes of course. Why  
was I thinking about this at the crack of dawn?

Well... Since time immemorial more than a few stalwart individuals,  
along with the generous support of our beloved developers have  
cranked out "point oh" releases which despite their obvious polish,  
still had some smudges which slipped through at the last minute. This  
wasn't for lack of trying mind you, some things will always go  
unnoticed during the beta period as not enough testers with given  
configurations are available. Are maybe they are available... Maybe  
these individuals just don't know how much we need them. Maybe they  
don't know how to get involved and help. And this is where I see the  
"community" part of the KDE community getting involved. It would  
require a bit of work and interoperability between the various camps  
@ KDE central to work together.
What if the promo team got together and started promoting the  
Bugsquad, urging more adventurous users to join on. What if they went  
beyond /. and digg, but out to other news sites (newsforge? c-net?  
*gasp* the bbc! cnn!) and evangelized the openness of the KDE  
community and it's willingness to contribute to near perfection that  
is KDE.

But this would actually have to exist in some form, wouldn't it.  
Palpable to the masses. Able to entice that eager young computer  
science major into giving "that linux thing" a try, even if only for  
the selfish end goal of having free IDE tools available for projects.
And how about that aspiring artist still deluging deviantart with  
awesome content. not windows art, but just art in general. Does it  
really matter if Gimp or photoshop is used to make a splash screen as  
long as it looks beautiful?
But why aren't Gimp, Krita or Inkscape being used anyways. Are  
features missing? Do the developers know? If they do know is time  
available for them to actually work on this feature, or would a  
community fundraiser be in order to pay a developer to implement that  
feature in say... 3 months time?

But alas, I digress as I so often tend to do when my head is in the  
clouds. I've gotten ahead of myself. I keep "hearing" from blogs that  
that KDE 4 platform is ripe for the hacking, which in my mind means  
it will soon be ripe for the testing. Soon those who get no greater  
pleasure than from bitching out an application will be in heaven.  
Steps to reproduce, and testcase heaven. "The backtraces must flow."  
So I've a question of sorts. Wouldn't it be easier to test features/ 
functionality earlier rather than later. There's been a (successful)  
call for collaboration between devs and artists, devs and usability  
folk in the past. How about devs and users? We are users, using us is  
implied in the name!
Wouldn't you rather have some way to test that code which you think  
fixes bug X on hardware,configurations not available to you. While  
the users willing to do this may not all fit the bill, at least some  
will. I suspect there are more willing to this than devs are willing  
to admit, and would love the chance to be proven wrong.
How about implementing a new svn check in variable which could be  
searched for like CANT_TEST_MYSELF. Then it could be search for and  
thrown in the svntalk/bugzilla interfaces. The bug testers could then  
take care of the rest.
This is but one example where the deities collaborating with the meek  
and lowly could potentially created "heaven on earth". I know, but i  
can dream can't I? Between the reponses good or bad, between this and  
the other mail, I'll actually attempt to give this grand experiment a  
go. If my grabbing the slippery reigns of leadership is a requisite  
for this to happen (though faaaaar more qualified individuals exist  
for such a thing) then so be it.
Sure it might fail miserably. But you never know till you try. I, for  
one, am willing and for the time being able (or as able as given an  
hour a day makes you). :-)

I've CC'd kde-devel to notify the developers that this mail exists,  
maybe a few of them who are subscribed to this list as well with post  
their views, or better, collate the thoughts of everyone who comments  
on this (if comments there be) and reply to this kde-quality mail.

Well that's all for now. I'm off. There be bacteria that need my  
tending.
---
Orville - Itchin' to be bitchin' - Bennett