Review Request: Transparent system tray icons

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 20 August 2008, you wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 August 2008, Aaron Seigo wrote:
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> > This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> > http://reviewboard.vidsolbach.de/r/137/#review127
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >
> > i'm not sure it makes sense to backport this to 4.1: it's a visual issue,
> > and in an applet that is notoriously flaky. with most of us on trunk/,
> > it's probably better to leave as-is.
> >
> > for 4.2, i'd rather see the new systray widget working and in trunk
> > instead of continuing to spend time resources on this one.
> >
> > - Aaron
>
> We will use it anyway, because we will ship 4.1.x.

cool; perhaps you could either open a branch with these patches in them or 
else *thoroughly test* and backport it to 4.1 yourself.

> People, you should think that all major distros *WILL* ship KDE 4.1 by
> default now, not 4.2 that will be out way after next releases.
> So, lot of current things make sense to backport for the sake to have KDE 4
> as main interface...

and then we end up with the mess we were in with 4.0.x where the vast majority 
of us are on 4.2 because that's the only place we can do feature development.

right now we're working on 4.2, with bugfixes only to 4.1. we have to be 
careful about what we backport so that we don't waste our own time/energy too 
much (thereby cheating the 4.2 release) and so that we don't destabalize 
4.1.x.

you care about 4.1.x a hell of a lot more than i do right now, and that's 
understandable. we have different priorities: as a distro person you live in 
the past (releases happen in the past) and i live in the future (for the 
release that is yet to come).

honestly, i think distros probably need to pick between a couple possible 
plans:

* get over the "we only ship 4.1.x now" idea and provide 4.2 as an update to 
4.1 when it comes out

* test and backport things they want to see in 4.1.x themselves; this would be 
a great way to give back to the project[1].

* live with what they get in 4.1.x and let people wait for the next release.

really, this is all about distros shipping a release and looking at the work 
we're doing in trunk/ (an unstable branch) and wanting to deliver that right 
now to the user. it's poor software development practice, and forgets that 
there will *always* be better stuff in trunk/ than in the last release. this is 
why we do freezes that lead to releases: to give downstream things that work 
while giving us the ability to continue changing things.

so while i understand where you are coming from, your advice is, imho, really 
dangerous. you're asking us to rush development and putting pressure on us 
that is not our to bear.

as far as i'm concerned, the plasma team will continue to backport crash and 
major functionality bug fixes. things like "make the icon backgrounds 
transparent" we won't; just look at all the comment frederikh had on the 
systray icon handling in the new tray to understand why backporting that would 
be a bit daft at the moment.


[1] OpenSUSE did a nice job of this in 4.0.x up to a point; several of their 
backports didn't make it back into svn unfortunately, but that is life.

-- 
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 Trolltech

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20080820/4433f33b/attachment-0001.sig