KDevelop 1.0 Beta 1 (a bit off-topic)

[Ralf Nolden]

Marko Samastur wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have a small complaint and a suggestion. Please don't take me wrong, I
> think Kdevelop is a great piece of software and that you are doing a
> great job.
> However, I do find this jump from 0.4 to 1.0 Beta 1 a bit odd. Kdevelop
> certainly deserves to be tagged with the later label, but why was it 0.4
> before?

There is acutally a good reason for the jump- one we might have not
foreseen last year or when it comes to the team in general. After the
0.3 and 0.4 release we had a chat session (as we haven't seen us yet in
the real world except Sandy, Stefan and Stefan).

We had 0.1 out last year which was really lame but pointed out where to
go. At that time, Qt 1.4 was comin out and KDE was going to 1.1. We then
worked with development code of the kdelibs until KDE 1.1 came out. As
KDE 2 was then started besides the acutal 1.x tree, we, in opposition to
KOffice, which had to switch because of technical reasons, stayed with
the 1.x tree.

Now, as the 1.x tree is coming to a close end with the next KDE release
in a few weeks and KDevelop got to be the killer app of KDE 1.2 or
whatever it will be called, a version number below 1 or even 0.5 would
be very disappointing to the users. I read that several times, well it's
0.3 or 0.4 and they can't have much. Those who, despite any version
number, decided to use it because of the already achieved quality, were
pointing out that the versions of KDevelop are stable- some bugs here
and there, mostly hidden or only occured under certain circumstances.

KDevelop 0.5 would have been an option, but we dicided the other way
because of this last release of KDE. And our goals are almost at the
end. Things that are upcoming are now most often by user reports or
whishes that come from outside - besides, for each one of us it is a
hobby and will stay so. Therefore, we only scheduled in 3 month periods,
but didn't exaclty know about the schedule dates for KDE and where that
will lead to. During the development time, a rise of 0.1 plus for each
development release was justified, as this displayed the next version.
Now, that was considered Alpha quality as the code was still in
progress; commmercials would have called that KDevelop 1.0 Alpha with
the release date. 

Open Source software most often uses 0.x version numbers for those
purpose, as we don't rely on numbers much, just the fact that it runs
matters.

Regards,

Ralf Nolden
The KDevelop Team