[RFC] Draft Roadmap for KDE 4.0

[Stephan Kulow]

Am Dienstag 06 März 2007 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
> What do you think?

What I think? Good you asked. Because if you continue discussing on this level 
we won't have another KDE release before 2012.

I like Tom's approach: Define a roadmap with milestones and set dates to it. 
If a milestone slips, define if you don't care about the milestone or the 
date. 

Don't take me wrong, nice kdelibs features will surely popup like mad every 
couple of days. But as a matter of fact: we managed to produce a pretty 
useful desktop with the crappy API just as well. While targeting for the 
perfect API dox and the perfectly designed APIs might sound like a super 
idea, it won't help me as a KDE user.

So dear KDE release team: drop your perfection plans, drop all modules that do 
not comply to the roadmap and let them ship later. 
kdevelop won't make it? Fine, supply a KDE4 template for kdevelop 3.4. 
kdepim won't make it? Too bad, make sure kdepim 3.5 runs fine on a KDE4 
desktop.
plasma won't make it in its full beauty? Define the bare minimum what is 
required and get as many hands to help as possible and deliver even better 
results for 4.1. I see good progress there, so I have a good feeling.

Every discussion around KDE4 pisses me at the moment actually as it's against 
the real aim a KDE4 roadmap should have: making sure a KDE4 snapshot runs on 
as many desktops as possible. I can start any KDE4 application at the moment 
and find easily tons of bugs and _that_ has to stop. If we break binary 
incompatibility 19 or 190 times in the timeline of KDE4 is _not_ the problem.

Sure every such case has to be evaluated as it hurts everyone not having a 
compile cluster, but I repeat: it's NOT our problem.

A feature freeze in august 2007 is _way_ too late - may I remember everyone 
that we started porting for KDE4 in may 2005? 

People hear my message: STOP IT! NOW!

Greetings, Stephan