tagging day.. right?

[Dirk Mueller]

Hi,

so it is officially tagging day now in my timezone, although I slightly feel 
that I need 8 more hours of sleep... anyway, I look at dashbot and it doesn't 
make me happy. There are 6 modules failing right now. on the bright side I've 
seen fixes for that the last few minutes so it should be better in a few 
hours. 

Anyway, it seems the announced "last chance for API" changes had some 
side-effects. I think it does need a few more hours so that people can at 
least catch up far enough to actually run the code and see the parts that 
urgently need fixing. 

About the so called freeze: I don't think that it makes sense to freeze the 
API at this point, int he sense that it can't change at all anymore. 

I think we should reserve the right to change the API given:

- it is one of the todo items in kdelibs/TODO (no new entries until day X)
- it can't be done after 4.0 in a BC fashion
- it doesn't cause a lot of porting effort

where the last point is the most important one, right after the first one 
(could be a page on techbase as well, doesn't actually matter).  I would also 
like to see API improvements that make it easier to port from KDE3 (yes, in 
the sense of less work or things to change).  It is time to make our desktop 
functional, and while this might mean to change the API here and there, our 
focus should be to get the application code we have from KDE3 running at 
least as good as it did with KDE3, without actually having to rewrite all of 
our existing code just because somebody thought this shiny new API would be 
way cooler. 

Another important job is to reduce the set of API that is non-deprecated and 
frozen for KDE 4.x series to the bare minimum. Remember that we can always 
add later. Right now we don't have a concrete list, or even a way to tag 
things as "known to go away" (kjsembed, khtml). We don't want to keep those 
parts around for all of KDE 4.x, even though they might stay for 4.0. 
Suggestions on how to do that are welcome. 

Comments, feedback appreciated. 

what did I want so say... ehh right:

- can we continue telling app developers that our API is now frozen
- can we stop telling libs developers that our API is frozen
- can anyone tell me when to tag?

Regarding the last question: I don't plan to do it early in the morning, I 
tend to 20 hours from now, perhaps a day later if anything urgent comes up. 
There are an awful lot of plasma changes the last few hours..

sorry for the long and confusing mail,

Dirk