The buzz about KDE 4.0

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday 27 June 2008, Kimberly Lazarski wrote:
> Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > I think we can agree that the customizability of KDE is valued by quite a
> > lot of people, ranging from users over developers to sysadmins.
> > The perceived reduction of these options is mainly based on
> > misunderstandings, e.g. configuration done differently, configuration
> > options not yet exposed yet through a GUI, user visible parts of
> > functionality not implemented yet, etc.
>
> That would be fine if there were specs for config files for konqueror,
> kwin, etc.

Most KDE configs are handled through a KDE framework called KConfigXT.
One of its implications is that each config it handles is described as an XML 
file, so called .kcfg files.
They are usually installed into $prefix/share/config.kfcg

> > Unfortunately these kind of architectural changes come with a price,
> > either delaying release and future development of "finished" parts until
> > all replacements reach feature parity or release some replacements with
> > just a feature subset.
>
> Understood - There is always some balance of tradeoffs in large projects
> like KDE
> however if features power users rely on are hidden by default with no
> GUI to change
> it but the code is present, the project site should at least contain a
> spec for the
> config files - even if it contains nothing more than

The config GUI is most likely just not done yet.
Creating good GUI for configurability is hard and developers quite often need 
feedback from users and usability engineers, thus they are often done after a 
feature is implemented. However, since string freeze (no new user visible 
text allowed) is usually at the same time or shortly after the feature 
freeze, especially the GUI for advanced features might have to be postponed 
to the next release.

> PR: to help restore the rep of KDE, wouldn't it make sense to use
> definitions
> that the proprietary software vendors use? That is, alpha is
> feature-incomplete
> but runs and may be usable but unstable; beta is feature-complete and
> stable enough to be used but has known and unknown defects, and release is
> stable enough for production, is of course feature-complete, and has no
> known fatal defects and known defects are documented (release notes, web
> site, bugzilla,
> etc.).

Actually the Alpha is already "feature complete" in the sense that no new 
feature can be added but features might still need to be fully implemented.
The first Beta is released after the hard freeze.

See for example the milestones of the KDE 4.1 release:
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.1_Release_Schedule

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-quality/attachments/20080628/4d0a2005/attachment.pgp