beta5 or rc1

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 11 November 2007, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> > Let's just do RC1 and get this thing out the door. I'm tired of
> > watching the release date slip and we don't do anything for the
> > project by allowing it to slip further.
> >
> > We _need_ to get a release out the door.
>
> Wrong attitude at this point of time. We are almost there and don't need to
> jump the gun (that's what you suggest).

i think there's a happy middle ground (see bottom for that however)

> Let's carefully review whether all showstoppers for an RC1 have been
> solved.

of course, our show stoppers themselves are somewhat funny (as in "they smell 
funny ... ") since last time i looked we did no have anything about the 
keyboard shortcuts control panel not working at all (though this has had the 
side effect of getting me used to the kde defaults again ;) while we do have 
some pretty minor showstoppers.

that said, in plasma: 

i'm dangerously close to having resizable and movable panels. they'll be done 
this week. multiple panels are there, xrandr works, xinerama works. taskbar 
and systray both need bugfixes; i wont get to working on those until next 
week, however. (i figure i only need 2 days to get the panel stuff done, 
which means it'll take a week ;). 

then it's the Desktop folder legacy support, event related bug fixes (e.g. 
dragging / moving icons), triaging the last feature patches (e.g. the hover 
buttons, which are there but a bit buggy atm) and the welcome applet.

which reminds me, i'd like to remove ktip-the-application when the welcome 
applet is added, since it will show daily tips .. and without the annoying, 
work interupting window and without the overhead of another app starting. =)

krush days are proving really good at catching regressions as they happen as 
well. those people hold my feet to the fire pretty good ;)

> If this is the case then I'm indeed all for releasing RC1. If this 
> is not the case then we should either consider postponing tagging for a
> week or we should just go for releasing Beta5 instead. At this point of
> time it's clearly obvious that we don't need to fear that it will take
> eternally to get KDE4 out of the door.
>
> I think it would be helpful if the release dude would ask the people

p.s. the "release dude" is deprecated now that we have a release team ;) but 
yeah, someone needs to do it.

> involved with the last few showstoppers when those showstoppers will be
> fixed. Based on that we should decide how to proceed. I remember that this
> was done for earlier releases. It helped to make people commit themselves
> to get the release out of the door soon while at the same time making sure
> that we'd adhere to our quality standards.

this makes more sense to me: a ballance between "well, let's just slip the 
date without putting any pressure on our work schedule" and "let's stick to 
the schedule regardless of what we've accomplished".

right now i'm very concerned that right now we are letting our release dates 
slip far too easily. because we don't really ask what is actually possible, 
things drift. i've been as guilty of this as anyone. it has to stop. like, 
yesterday. ;)

we should really strive to make a december release if at all possible (for so 
many reasons which we've gone over so many times now), and that may well mean 
a big final push.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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