KDevelop 3.1 - Release or postpone?

[Jens Dagerbo]

Hi,

I have a simple question to the devel team: Why are we releasing? 


The OSS credo of "it's done when it's done" is something I doubt anyone would 
apply to KDevelop-3.1 at this point. Not to trivialize the release process 
and the troubles/efforts that goes with it, but the KDE release is as far as 
I can tell the _only_ reason we have to go into feature freeze right now.

Is this a good enough reason? What's the alternative?

The large recently contributed TrollProject patch made me think about this. 
It's apparently an important patch to what is arguably one of the most 
central parts of KDevelop. So much in fact that Amilcar is apparently trying 
to squeeze it past coolo right now. Assuming he's unsuccessful, do we leave 
it out for another 6-9 months? (Wild speculation on KDevelop-3.2 timeframe.)

What about the other unfinished / semi-unfinished / unpolished stuff? 

# I found 2-3 mildly to severly misleading or downright wrong strings in 
KDevelop last night. This was without looking for any. I'm sure there are 
more.

# Embedded KDevDesigner is experimental but has ended up as the default 
handler for .ui files and there is no currently mechanism to configure 
KDevelop otherwise. It also has no way of showing the new splash screen (no, 
not important, but the similar images does help to create the feeling of a 
unified development platform - appearance is important. :) )

# KNewStuff integration hasn't happened, but it was a large part of why the 
appwizard rewrite was done. The appwizard still feels a little flakey, and 
sure is slow.

# My own vapourware project - plugin profiles - is currently just a hardcoded 
restriction in appwizard. I'm embarrassed, but I hadn't time to finish it. I 
need another week at it.

# I started looking at bumping the plugin version last night, but quickly 
realized that this needs to be done in parallell with a discussion of which 
plugins to actually save and which to kick. (For instance, I had a quick look 
at the subversion plugin, and it doesn't look very fit..) Should be a 
different thread.

# Amilcar spoke of fixing Run options a bit, something that's really needed. 
The whole run/debug/automake confusion here is in painful need of a cleanup. 
Setting of executable run directory is something that's apparently important 
for some also.

# And to really mix it up: Roberto said he'd start committing his new cpp 
stuff in a few weeks. No one (apart from him) knows at this point how well it 
integrates with the current KDevelop, but if integration is easy, is it 
perhaps better to get it in now and release a better 3.1 two months later 
than hold off on it and release it with 3.2 nine(?) months from now?

# and of course there is more...


I'm pretty sure we could make most of the above happen if we put another month 
of development (including akademy) into KDevelop-3.1, but this of course 
depends on if you all think this is a good idea and actually have time to 
turn up and do the work.. ;)

I'm not saying it's not without merit to release a KDevelop-3.1 with KDE-3.3, 
but I think it would make sense to release it two months later if it was 
significantly better. Either way we should make a conscious decision to 
release or not release, not just let it "happen" regardless of the state of 
the application.


regards,


jd