The case for a kdelibs 4.8

[Markus Slopianka]

On Donnerstag 29 September 2011 18:11:12 Kevin Kofler wrote:

> Wait and see the chaos that will come up when users open their Help/About
> in Konqueror and it tells them that they're using "Konqueror 4.8.0 under
> KDE 4.7.6". (And yes, it still says only "KDE" in 4.6.5, I haven't checked
> 4.7 or 4.8 for whether that's fixed there.)

True but only in one line ans the explanation that the Dev Platform is meant, is written 
in "About KDE".
That said, I'm toying with ideas about a complete redesign of the About window for KF5. 
When/If I come up with a somewhat presentable mock-up, I'll post it and hopefully a 
programmer implements something based on that.
A completely new About window will also fix legacy issues like that string.


> > and strangely shipping Kontact 4.4.11 with SC 4.5+ was also not confusing
> > to most users.
> 
> Actually, that was (and still is) quite confusing to many users. Look at
> the mailing lists and forums.

I really don't think it was the majority and the Kontact case is user-visible software 
unlike Frameworks/Platform which normal users usually do not care about.
MS Office 2003 also ran on Windows 2000 and the majority of users had no problems 
understanding that. ;-)

And we better continue to educate our users that Platform version and Workspace version 
does not need to match.
I have yet to see any ideas for KDE Plasma Desktop 5.0 which means that maybe
KPD 4.9 in summer 2012 will require KF 5.0. So unless someone completely rewrites KPD for 
the summer release (maybe basing it on Plasma Active) and therefore justifying a major 
version jump to 5.0, as a promo person I'd rather educate our users now before we see 
people (at worst: reviewers) complaining that "KDE 5 looks just like KDE 4.8".

(As a side note I also think that KDE Applications should completely lose their version 
number and get date-based versioning because any application can get major new features at 
any time – see Dolphin 2.0 in SC 4.8.)


> Fedora 15 actually has KDE SC 4.6.x, not 4.7.

Just a few days ago someone on your mailing list claimed otherwise but whatever... that's 
not the main topic here.