tagging day.. right?

[Allen Winter]

On Tuesday 24 July 2007 6:22:37 pm Dirk Mueller wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 
Things are getting better.
It has been a very frustrating couple of days.

Please don't tag until we reach a consensus
about the issues below.

> 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
> 
I'm ok with the requirements listed above.  As long as we make a document
that says "the following stuff might change in future 4.0.0 pre-releases".
And publish, and publicize that document.  And it shouldn't be a very long list.

Which reminds me: dfaure is the closest thing we have to a kdelibs maintainer, IMO.
I don't feel comfortable proceeding much farther without his input.


> 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).  
Right, we could put our possible changes doc on techbase.

> 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). 
Sure.

> 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. 
> 
Yes but I thought that's why we wanted to shutdown the API work.
So people would concentrate fully on the apps.
??

> 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
yes, except we tell them that there may be the "following list of changes."

> - can we stop telling libs developers that our API is frozen
yes, except we tell them to stop tinkering, but if you do want
to work on the API here's a short list of stuff to do.

> - can anyone tell me when to tag?
I propose Thursday.  At least one more day of cleaning up is needed.
And I promised an extra day for some folks for some last minute API stuff.

Regarding "Alpha3" vs. "Beta1":  The API and apps are beta quality.
The desktop "glue" (like kwin) is still in pretty bad shape.

If we say "Beta1", the naysayers will bitch about how horrible.
If we say "Alpha3", the naysayers will bitch that we are running late.

Pick your poison.  Personally, I like "Alpha3" because we can say that
we are working our asses off but still have some work to do.
IOW: it will be ready when we think it is ready.

> 
> 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,
> 
Not so bad after I read it 3 times ;)

-Allen