Release schedule for Plasma Next

[Eike Hein]

On Friday 31 January 2014 15:57:19 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> Isn't it better to communicate the meaning through our release announcements
> than through the implied meanings of words like "alpha" and "beta"? I just
> read the wikipedia article [1] for it and from that I assume that everybody
> in our audience has a different expectation and thus we cannot meat the
> expectation if we rely on the meaning.
> 
> I prefer that we are verbose and explain what the current development
> snapshot means. Whether we call it "beta", "tech preview", "snapshot" or
> "goal" doesn't matter to me. If people complain that the software is
> <insertrandominsultweheardabout4.0>, we can point to the release
> announcement and show that it holds what we promised.

For that you need to get people interested enough to actually read
the announcement, instead of just reading a headline or the
guaranteed-to-misunderstand-something Phoronix version of the
announcement :). I think it's better to use names that convey infor-
mation es early as possible, instead of relying on an attached de-
finition. That might be safer in the "cover our asses" sense, but
isn't as de-facto effective in getting the message through IMHO. By
the time you need to justify yourself in face of a complaint, you've
already missed the boat on avoiding the complaint in the first place.

And yes, "Alpha" and "Beta" can still be misunderstood, but there's
a decent amount of folks to which it means the "right things" along
with some nearly universally reliable traits like "Alpha is earlier
than Beta", "Beta is on the home stretch", etc. ...

Another factor is actually making people excited - using familiar
milestone names does a better job at keeping people in the loop on
what's going on in KDE, even if it's only a vague sense. "Plasma
Next has a second beta out now" is just a little more concrete than
"Plasma Next just put out Preview Release 3".

Of course in the grand scheme of things - whatever we end up doing
in those three months naming-wise won't change the world much one
way or the other.


> Cheers
> Martin

Cheers,
Eike