Are We Ready? Beta1 vs. Alpha3

[Tom Albers]

At Tuesday 24 July 2007 16:26, you wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 July 2007 16:09:42 Tom Albers wrote:
> > > Why do you think that? It sounds a bit based on being hopeful to me
> > > :)
> >
> > I think that because when there is a public beta, more users will use
> > the software and run into these problems. Hence increasing the pressure
> > on the developers responsible for that part (or annoy a developer so
> > much that he will fix it).
> 
> But the difference in alpha and beta lies not in the willingness of the 
> developer to delve in and do work, does it?

Hmm. At least partly. When we move closer to a release, i guess people will get a more important feeling of fixing their bugs.

> What I've been trying to explain, and I feel you are not getting, is that 
> when kdeprint moves from having 1 input format to having 2 (since Qt4) 
> that requires a lot of rethinking and work all over the codebase. And I 
> see that has not been done and that one dialog shows this very clearly.
> Your answer that this is just a bug seems to miss the point I'm trying to 
> make.
> Bottom line; if fixing this problem requires certain rewrites and breaking 
> of stability and possibly the breaking of the API, that to me is a module 
> that is alpha quality.

Right. If breaking api is needed to fix an important bug, so be it.  But to stay in alfa-mode to wait until there is a developer who wants to work on kdeprint is not a wise thing to do either. So let's move on and go for the beta. I can't decide if this is a grave bug, but if it is, we can not and should not make a final release without solving it.

In any case, if we would have named this release alfa3, the plan was still to api-freeze it, so it was no solution for your problem. If someone works on kdeprint and this is grave for koffice, it qualifies for api-break-exception if there is no way round it.

Toma