interesting comment from a poster on phoronix

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday, 2015-08-20, 16:29:27, ianseeks wrote:
> On Thursday 20 Aug 2015 16:29:07 Kevin Krammer wrote:

> > I can understand that there is a certain mental step involved in realizing
> > that a vendor can in fact have more than one product.
> > 
> > What I do not understand is why other vendors would be allowed to have
> > multiple products but KDE would not.
> > Why KDE should cease to develop applications and soley work on a desktop
> > shell.
> > Why Qt application developers should not benefit from third party Qt
> > libraries and restrict themselves to those provided by the Qt project.
> 
> i don't think thats being suggested or meant.

I am not so sure.
It is not uncommon to come across postings demanding that application 
developers stop working on the application they have worked on for years but 
"instead" work on whatever the poster in question would prefer.

Calling for denying them the option of releasing when they believe it to make 
sense is very much in line with that.

> I'm seeing this from a users
> point of view, not a developer. Simplicity is best from the users
> perspective.

Sure, it would be nice to not have any applications at all, not even have the 
notion of applications as something that is not part of the operating system 
or even the device, but this has been the case for decades now and even new 
platforms such as mobile devices still use it to some extend.

I think that people either don't care about the difference of application vs 
base system or they understand it well enough to handle different release 
times and resulting different version numbers.

> Maybe its the way the headline in the article was put together
> implying that that they all depended on each other but there seemed to be
> no common link.

That might very well be, but the comment did not sound like it was targetted 
at the article.
The fact that you posted the link to a KDE list suggests that you also thought 
the poster directed it at KDE instead of the source of the confusion (i.e. the 
article trying to hard to crosslink to other articles at the same site).

> > What would be the benefit of that. This would only artifically suggest
> > relation where there is none.
> > Microsoft Office 2015 is not called Microsoft Office 10.2015 just because
> > it happens to be released at the time when Windows 10 is the vendor's
> > current "desktop" product.
> > 
> > Users could be confused, guess a relation and assume Office 2015 can only
> > be used on Windows 10.
> > While Microsoft would gladly have as many Windows users as possible to
> > upgrade to Windows 10, they have abstained from creating this mental
> > bridge. Most likely because they rather have people get Office 2015 even
> > if
> > they are "just" on Windows 7 or 8.
> 
> I'm not sure if this MS Office is a good example because its a set of
> programs that are related to a function whereas KDE Applications are a
> collection of mostly unrelated programs.

True, but my impression was that the alleged problem was that two products had 
different version numbers, not that one product was a combination of items.
Microsoft is just one of the most well known vendors in a similar situation, 
so using two of their products as a comparison appeared sensible.

The Adobe Creative Suite might be a comparable example for an application 
bundle, where the version of the bundle also is the version of the 
applications inside the bundle (apparently not all, the "CS6 Master 
Collection" contains mostly "CS6" versions but also mentiones "Flash Builder 
4.6")

> Will KDEPIM become KDEPIM5 once its all ported to KF5?

You mean Kontact?
I think it has the version of the bundle it is in.

> > Exactly why KDE Applications has a very different version scheme, to avoid
> > people mistakingly assume a connection between the applications and Plasma
> > desktop when there is none as far as using the applications is concerned.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Kevin
> 
> Have i opened an old wound here with this question?  Apologies if i have.

I find the discussion actually quite valuable.
For example I would not have considered that the poster on Phoronix was 
actually referring to the article as their source of confusion, while this is 
actually way more likely.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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