thinking ahead to 4.5: features or polish?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On November 3, 2009, Sean wrote:
> I think this is a excellent idea for a number of reasons. It will shows
> users that KDE4 is not just all about new features and more features and
> more......

i'd like to make my position on this aspect of it perfectly clear:

it is likely to be true that people who use plasma (and those who don't .. yet 
;) will read all kinds of good things into this. it also likely true that a 
few of our anti-fans will take it as an opportunity to bitch and moan in our 
direction ("see! it's so bad they are spending a whole release on bug 
fixing!")

be that as it may, that shouldn't matter one bit to us when making this 
decision. we need to make decisions in our development because it is good for 
our goals and for us as the creators of plasma. what is good for our goals and 
for us will end up being good for our user base.

in this case, one of our long standing goals has to make the various plasma 
components solid, stable and shiny. we always work towards that end, and if we 
use a dev cycle primarily for polishing it would be to satisfy that end. we 
need no other justification than that, right? :)

conversely, caring too much about the reactions of the segment of the user 
base that is most visible to us (the enthusiast users who are online and 
interact with us) will lead to unimaginable screw ups. as a whole, opinions 
dredged from that group have been wrong at nearly every single turn in the 
plasma saga over the last 2 years. while we can learn much from usage of 
plasma by people, we ought to be careful in how we gather such information and 
we must always be the ones who interpret that data and decide what it means in 
terms of our efforts. plasma is simply too complex, too nuanced and in some 
aspects too new of an idea to be "crowd sourced" effectively.

> Plasma does seem have issues that get missed, such as Plasmoids acting
>  nasty when moving out of the panel or resizing. Knocking out these types
>  of bugs is important or just getting a number of Plasmoids acting properly
>  and ship these only.

of course we'll aim for getting things working well rather than losing 
features we've already shipped. i don't think pulling components isn't a 
realistic option except perhaps in the worst case scenarios.

> I'd be willing to help debug and look for nasties, so count me in!

great :)

-- 
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 Development Frameworks
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