[Kst] Kst 2.0.0 rc1

[Barth Netterfield]

We need to think through our release plans.

There is a lot to be said for a release now:

I totally feel that kst2 is usable in a 'production' environment,
since we just used it full time for the BLASTpol integration.  Most of
the paper cuts we experienced have been fixed (though Peter Milne just
reminded me of one today), so, a quick release of some sort is in
order.

Secondly, there are some disastrously bad beta releases floating
around (the newest one on the KDE server is beta2, which really should
have been called Alpha 2) so we need to get these fully superseded
everywhere.

On the other hand, there are some fairly fundamental issues (besides
the odd bug or missing feature) that are still not resolved that might
prevent us from calling it "2.0":

  -We have not worked out the treatment of absolute vs relative path
names for data sources in kst files, though we have a preliminary plan
in bugzilla.   This could effect what ends up in a kst file, and we
want to make sure that a 2.0 kst file remains compatible with kst 2.13
five years from now.
  -If we want kst to be a KDE app (and I think we do) we need to
KDEify kst.  This means we need to be compatible with the KDE life
cycle ( http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/SVN_Guidelines ).  In
particular, we need API docs for data sources and plugins, and we need
to pass the krazy checker.  We have something like 1100 krazy checker
issues, ranging from the trivial, like missing email addresses in the
copyright sections, to the fundamental, like the fact that we don't
currently use KDE at all :-)  This would ideally be handled before a
2.0 release.
  -When we do the API docs, we may find that there are some
improvements that would be good for the plugin's API before we lock in
with 2.0.

So: maybe the best approach is to fully release a 'usable beta', and
make sure it gets into the KDE servers, and on kde-apps now, and
continue to hold off on 2.0 until it is a true KDE4 app.  At the same
time, Steve Benton has scripted up an ubuntu ppa which he updates
~weekly from SVN.  While we continue to improve things quickly, this
is an even better approach for ubuntu/debian users.  We are
considering advertising this path as well (though we would need to
make sure that the version string is useful in the bug wizard).

Thoughts?

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Peter Kümmel <syntheticpp at gmx.net> wrote:
> I've uploaded a release candidate to sourceforge,
> .gz for Linux and binaries for Windows.
>
> Please test if we could use these files for the 2.0.0 release.
>
> Peter
>
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-- 
C. Barth Netterfield
University of Toronto
416-845-0946