Yet another failed KDE release?

[Duncan]

Ross Boylan posted on Tue, 07 May 2013 14:40:50 -0700 as excerpted:

> On Tuesday, May 07, 2013 02:54:19 AM James Tyrer wrote:
> 
>> The KDE development team appears to be interested in something other
>> than producing a stable release.  It really is that simple.

As Kevin keeps hammering hammering on, KDE isn't a single product.  There 
are many that would (wrongly) say the same about Linux, which clearly 
isn't the case, or about Adobe (his example, very good one BTW), or even 
about "Windows" or MS, when the bug's actually in MS Office (not MS 
Windows) or even in Adobe's PDF reader or something else only related to 
MS Windows in that it runs on the platform.

>> I find very useful the dystopian novel: "The Rise of the Meritocracy"
>> which is a critique of the idea of "the meritocracy".  A meritocracy is
>> defined by the search for merit -- but that is dependent on the
>> definition of merit.  I find that I have no merit in the KDE project
>> despite the fact that I went to college and studied EE and computer
>> science.  In the KDE project, you obtain merit be designing a new
>> application.  So, that is the nail that everyone is hitting with their
>> hammer.

[Paragraph immediately below moved from elsewhere to address along with 
the next one in reply to the above.]

> I too am finding the reliability of KDE and its apps not what I would
> like, but one thing puzzles me about this complaint, the statement that
> bug fixing is not welcomed...

> Where do you get the idea that you have "no merit in the KDE project",
> or that someone fixing bugs would be greeted with anything other than
> enthusiasm? Well, it's free software and so there's bound to be some
> static, but apart from that :)

Without trying to get too personal in my reply (which I should say 
explicitly is simply personal opinion), there's a bit of interpersonal 
history here that you evidently aren't aware of.  He came across rather 
strongly on a few bugs, with the devs in charge of those products 
reacting defensively to what they saw as demands he had no right to make 
as a result.  Regardless of the merits of the individual bugs and 
proposed fixes (which I'm staying neutral on), the unfortunate result is 
that now certain devs prefer to stay as far away from involvement with 
him and anything he proposes as possible.

But of course that doesn't and shouldn't prevent contributions to other 
kde-based projects, or indeed, /starting/ other independent but kde-based 
projects, if so desired.

> P.S. Composed in kmail 1.13.7, which mysteriously hangs from time to
> time, can't autocomplete from the address book, and sometimes show blank
> messages with any way I can see to get it show html.

Kmail-1 is an effectively abandoned product.  While it continued to work 
with newer kde for awhile, and my distro, gentoo, continued to offer both 
the pre-akonadified kdepim-4.4.x and the newer version in parallel for 
awhile (so the admins of individual installations could choose which they 
wanted), without anyone officially adopting and continuing to maintain 
the pre-akonadi version, that's getting tough to maintain as mainline kde 
progresses farther away, leaving kdepim-4.4 (with kmail-1) further and 
further behind and stale.

I believe gentoo/kde finally dropped kdepim-4.4 support recently, or if 
not, will be doing so shortly, citing as reasons the very bugs you 
mention above.  It's simply getting too far behind to maintain 
compatibility with current kde any longer.

Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile 
either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions... unless 
someone steps up to adopt the abandoned code and bring it forward as a 
new, independent project.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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