[kde-ev-marketing] Delaying 4.0?

[Torsten Rahn]

On Wednesday 28 November 2007 15:29:26 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> From a PR point of view, and for the sake of the release party, KDE is in a
> state where we'd be able to present it at such an event.
> I don't share your opinion on what's worse, party before release or party
> after release. You really want to have the release out when you're showing
> it to the public (which is what the event is all about, Industry, Press and
> Community). Telling them that it's not released and thus still very much
> vapourware would be "quite unfortunate" (read "sucks").

Well, 

at the current pace I'm pretty confident that we can do a decent release right 
in time before the release party (and I'm all in favour of the release delay 
Sebas suggested).

However even if it turned out that we had to tag during the release party or 
even a week afterwards I don't see a big problem with that. There is no 
problem having a release party while you're doing the final stitches.
By that time we _will_ have something that will resemble our final product 
pretty closely.

However if I had to choose between

1.)  the situation where in two years people remember that we had a release 
party that happened 1-2 weeks before tagging
2.)   the situation where in two years people remember that we released KDE 4 
some days too early with obvious showstoppers not being fixed just to meet 
the date of the release party.

I'd gladly choose 1.). 

It's really better to have a release party during the last contractions while 
waiting for our baby to arrive than to go through all the hazzle of releasing 
something that sucks in terms of quality just to meet the date of the release 
party. In a few months nobody would remember the former "glitch" but 
everybody would remember the latter.
And we for sure wouldn't be the first software project that would have a party 
immediately before the release either.

Again as I said I'm pretty sure that we can get KDE 4.0 tagged before the 
release party. So let's concentrate on that right now. 

Torsten


  



-- 
 Torsten Rahn

 Tel.: 0 21 61 - 46 43 - 192

credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080
Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach
Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz