the "gamma" proposal - details that need working out

[Tom Albers]

Op vr 6 jul 2007 18:55 schreef u:
> I talked to many people at Akademy already about this idea, but Dirk
> suggested that I send it to the mailing list to make it a little more
> official and through official channels.  Discussion is still a valuable
> thing on this particular issue, but based on the response from the packagers
> and marketing teams here, this may be pretty much a done deal.  

"done deal" without consulting this list seems weird and wrong to me.

> 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.

Basically you are delaying the release three-four months, without any obvious reason.

> Here is some additional justification:
> 
> The main use of this extra time would be for bugfixing, translations, and
> HCI relating tweaks. Additionally, the plasmoid community on
> kde-apps.orgcan already have started to ramp up, so that when
> 4.0.0 is announced, and we've been promising a 'new desktop paradigm', well
> there will be some actual applets that are using plasma to do new things
> that have been developed in those three months.

I'm against this. We have a planning, which has or have had room for all this.

> The response from some of the people present representing the distros has
> been positive, and those representing kubuntu, gentoo, suse, and mandriva I
> have talked to at least, and there have been no real objections from them,

I love them all, but they don't decide on the release schedule. That's the world upside down.

> The point of gamma1 however is to
> have every developer porting their stuff to kde 4 full time, 

We have said that for the technical preview, alfa1 and for beta1 (which is alpha 2 now). Not again. Some developers have a planning and want to get a release so they can start new features. Delaying this hurts the Good Guys and rewards the Bad Guys. 

> the 4.x community, as well as finding all those corner case critical bugs
> that we will have missed that they would surely find.  

In the planning we have two release candidates planned for that, that period can be extended when critical bugs come in.

Toma