2009 introspective

[Aaron J. Seigo]

Hi...

I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of as 
many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible, and I'd like some input from 
you on Dolphin and Konqueror. 

In particular, what I'm looking for are 2-4 bullet items for each of these two 
questions:

* What have been the defining achievements in the last year?

* What are the main focus points and or goals for the project in 2009?


If you're feeling extra helpful, you might want to also provide some input on:

* What are the major pain points in your project right now?

* Outside of the core libs (kdecore, kdeui, kio, kfile) what are the most 
critical pieces of KDE technologies that your project is relying on?


You can reply to me directly; I'll be collating and making public the results 
when they are in ...

As an example of what I'm looking for, here's the answer set of Plasma:

In the last year:

	* Parity with KDE3 desktop/panels
	* Finished out the foundational pieces (extenders, activities, scripting..)
	* Moved libplasma to kdelibs

Focus points in 2009:

	* Ease of creating Plasma components (Plasmate)
	* Netbook interface
	* Media center components
	* Remote plasmoids
	* Social desktop features
	* Improved integration with Nepomuk and rest of workspace

Major point points:

	* x.org driver quality
	* QGraphicsView is still going through growing pains
	* newness of our own codebase resulting in larger #s of defects

Major technologies we rely (or will be relying) on:

	* x.org and kwin compositing features
	* QGraphicsView
	* Solid
	* Nepomuk



As for why I'm doing this survey, here's an excerpt from 
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/04/trailheads.html:

"The pre-4.0 development of KDE was helped along by everyone knowing what we 
were striving towards: we had the Pillars, these new big chunks of technology 
we were busy slotting into place so that we could build ever better 
applications on top of; we had a renewed focus on clean, usable interfaces; we 
were also aiming for beauty and greater platform independence.

The individual projects around the KDE universe all swirled around these 
shared goals. Each headed in their own direction that reflected their own 
interpretation of these goals as weighted by their development team in terms 
of importance. Not remarkably, while there was variance in execution, there 
was a remarkable harmony in the overall approach and results.

That didn't happen by accident: it happened because we were communicating with 
each other about our goals and in-the-moment situations. I was part of only a 
fraction of these conversations, but I remember the huge number of informal 
meet ups both online and in person (part of my "coffee shop meetings around 
the world" tour, or at least that's sometimes how it felt ;). It was inspiring 
and helpful and marked a high water point in KDE community togetherness for 
me.

We're into 2009 now and it's time to stoke those fires again."

Thanks for your time and energy in advance :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software






-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <https://mail.kde.org/mailman/private/kfm-devel/attachments/20090504/f153be00/attachment.sig>