plasmate alpha1 release

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On February 2, 2010, Yuen Hoe Lim wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> would it be reasonable to try for an alpha release with:
> > * tagging on the 8th
> > * release on the 10th, assuming the tagging goes well
> 
> Sounds awesome! I'm not sure what kind of quality would be expected of
> alpha software though :P 

may/will crash from time to time, has most features (though potentially not 
all) planned for a release already visible but certainly not ready for a 
proper release, let alone usage in production environments.

>    - AFAIK we are only (more or less) good to go for Plasmoids. I think
>    runners et al don't quite work. Do we "hide" those options for now? :P

that really depends on whether or not we plan on getting them working for the 
"actual" release. usually punting features like this doesn't happen until 
feature freeze, so i say leave them in for now and let's see if we can't get 
them working.

>    - Likewise we currently have some UI stubs for unimplemented features
>    (eg. Publish to GHNS), "hide" those too?

same answer as above. do we have a list of these TODOs as well as "What 
Works"? if not, let's start a list here:

	http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/PlasMate

>    - I haven't really been testing the timeline, and now that I tried it,
> it doesn't seem to work right =( Am I not using it correctly? Or is it
> bugged? Diego could you check? :P

what problems did you run into? or is it just generally inoperable?

>    - I can't seem to create a configuration dialog for my (Python) plasmoid
>    in PlasMate. I used to override showConfigurationInterface(), but that
>    doesn't seem to work while using PlasMate. As long as I set
>    hasConfigurationInterface to True and have the "User Interface" folder
>    empty, the plasmoid always crashes when I attempt to view the
> configuration interface (right-click > settings).

do you have a backtrace for us?

> IIRC you're supposed to
> put QtDesigner-generated ui files in "User Interface", 

correct

> if so, does it make
> sense to release now when there's no QtDesigner integration? Or we just
> leave the configuration interface to "future work"?

yes, this can happen later. not perfect, but we can get to it.

>    - Additional, non-urgent point following from the last: crashing the
>    plasmoid crashes PlasMate. This doesn't seem right, but I've no idea how
> to fix it at this point.

the only solution to this would be turn the plasmoid viewer into an external 
process and communicate between Plasmate and the viewer over DBus.
 
> > * a release every month, around the 10th of the month
> > * if changes warrant it and there is the manpower for it, interim
> > releases * aim for first betas in may, this would also include a feature
> > freeze * aim to move it into extragear/sdk/ and release a 0.1 release in
> > tandem with
> > KDE SC 4.5
> 
> Sounds good to me, although with only 2-3 devs I'm not sure how many
> changes we'll be able to push each month.

less important than features will be fixing bugs, tidying up UI here and 
there, etc. if a once-a-month release cycle is too aggressive, we can always 
step it down to once every other month, once every quarter, or whatever.

and hopefully as we start down this path we'll be able to grow the number of 
contributors as well. right now Plasmate is stunted because it doesn't have 
users. few users == few contributions. 

-- 
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