Plasma 5?

[John Layt]

On 5 May 2014 14:55, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:

> I am not happy with the 2014.6 name and naming scheme. There I said it.

Here's a few random thoughts to add to the mix.

I'll admit I always thought the YYYY.MM number scheme somewhat awkward
to use, but that the reasons behind it had a lot of validity.  However
a simple sequential version number is far better for packaging and
support/bug triage issues, and having a matching major version number
across frameworks, plasma and apps might help that too.  Everything
Sebas says here is very valid, it is a better *technical* solution,
but Jos is equally right that a mixture of same major number but
different minor version numbers could be confusing to end-users.  And
we keep running into that PR problem of what to call it without
painting all KDE products as a monolithic whole.  I firmly believe our
viability as a community in the next 2-3 years is going to depend on
how strongly we can rebrand in potential developers and users minds as
a community that develops useful apps for any platform (especially
Android), as well as providing a great Linux desktop if they want one.
The Qt5 transition gives us a chance to emphasise that as a clear
break, we've put a lot of effort into the technical side of it, we
just need to get that PR side to work for us.  We need a working
numbering scheme that is co-ordinated between the 3 products to ensure
we put that message across, we can't really decide them in isolation
(hence me, a fringe Plasma person, adding my tuppence worth), but one
that is not too similar so it appears a monlithic "KDE" unit.

My preference would be for Plasma to use a v2 numbering scheme "under
the bonnet" (with perhaps some sonames using v5 if needed), but to
never mention that number in the PR effort, instead to use the release
date when really needed.  For example the first release announcement
could say something like "The KDE Community is proud to annouce the
December 2014 release of their Plasma workspace.  This is the first
release of Plasma using Qt5 and the KDE Frameworks."  With careful
wording, you might be able to get away with never mentioning version
numbers.  If anyone does use the version numbers when naming them it
would then be Plasma 2 and Frameworks 5, neatly avoiding the ability
to call it all KDE 5.

A major concern for Martin is people not realising how old their
version is, and a date based scheme would communicate this, albeit in
a vacuum of the average user not knowing what our release cycle is, so
not really knowing if it is "too old" or not.  Perhaps there are other
ways to address this concern?  Where do people see version numbers and
how much do they pay attention to them, especially the Plasma version
number?  For apps we have various "About KDE" and bug report dialogs
which give the App version number and the Platform version number, but
I can't think of anywhere we see the Plasma version string in the UI?
So people only see the Plasma version in their software installer?
Unfortunately we can't do a lot about the number there (blame distros
imposing a bad UX that depends on package version numbers, although we
might be able to influence Apper, or use the AppStream data to include
the date in the description).  In the "About KDE" dialogs we could
choose to emphasise the release date instead of the version number,
perhaps with a new tab that includes the full app, frameworks and
Plasma version details?

Cheers!

John.

P.S.  Sorry Jens, it's a neat solution, but "Plasma by KDE" is just
way too pretentious sounding and begging to be trolled... ;-)