[kde-ev-marketing] the "gamma" proposal - details that need working out

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Friday 06 July 2007 18:55, Troy Unrau wrote:
>
> The proposal is to add another layer to the release stack called 'gamma' or
> similar.  The release cycle up until Oct 23rd would remain unchanged,
> except perhaps the RC sections might need to be renamed as gamma candidate,
> for instance.

After some initial scepticism I have to say that I like the plan very much 
now, provided that we execute it properly. Some thoughts on that:

- We shouldn't delay the release. This would send a bad signal. It also would 
remove some of the motivation to get things stable for the October release 
and would be unfair to all the developers who work hard on meeting the 
current release schedule.

- The October release should be labeled as stable (because of the reasons 
given above for not delaying the release), so I don't think "gamma" really 
hits the nail here. It's a release for developers and early adopters, though. 
So maybe it could be labeled as "Platform Release" or something like that.

- The Mountainview release would be an additional step of the release 
schedule. It would mean releasing the full KDE 4 universe, as stable as 
possible at that point of time, to the broad mass of all users. Hopefully we 
can come up with a nice label for that. ("KDE 4 Everybody" ;-)

- At aKademy somebody proposed to introduce something like a release 
countdown. I think this would be a very powerful tool. Having a countdown on 
our web site, maybe sending periodic updates to relevant mailing lists, 
writing a plasma applet to show it, whatever else, all this could be used to 
create a strong awareness of the full KDE 4 release, announced at 
Mountainview. It could also set the pace for working from the October release 
to the Mountainview release for translators, bug fixers, 3rd party 
developers, etc. I'm pretty sure we can create a lot of suspense and hype 
around this. Starting the countdown with the October release sounds like the 
natural idea. This will make the initial 4.0 announcement pretty exciting 
("Here we are: KDE 4.0, and there is even more exciting stuff to come. You 
will get it in 100 days. Start counting.")

- One very important target group for creating the Mountainview release could 
be 3rd party developers. 3 months seems to be an appropriate time scale for 
porting KDE 3 applications to KDE 4, so we could try to get as many 3rd party 
apps as possible to be ported to KDE 4 and included in the release 
announcements. Maybe we can even create a special part of the community 
around this porting efforts and make it a sport to port apps. Including 3rd 
party apps in our big splash release announcement would also send a very 
strong message about the outreach and size of the KDE community. 

- We should try to organize some parallel events to the Mountainview event. 
KDE is a global phenomenon. Having an event in North America is really great, 
but we shouldn't neglect other regions.

> The original proposal is essentially to annouce Oct 23rd as gamma1 and Dec
> 11th or similar as gamma2 if desired.  Our date for 4.0.0 would then be
> something like Jan 23rd or Feb 1st, which we really need to decide now so
> that we can start booking hotels and conference rooms and so forth in
> mountainview.

Please don't mess around with the release numbering. Oct 23rd is 4.0.0 and the 
Mountainview release should include 4.0.1 or 4.0.2 or whatever is ready at 
that time.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>