KDE 4.4 Schedule

[Tom Albers]

At Friday 07 August 2009 09:03, you wrote:
> Le Friday 07 August 2009, Allen Winter a écrit :
> > On Thursday 06 August 2009 2:02:07 pm Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > > I have some people already asking me about the 4.4 schedule, do we have
> > > an answer to that other than the blank page in
> > > http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.4_Release_Schedule ?
> >
> > Not yet.
> > Guess we should start discussing.
> >
> > I assume everyone is still ok with the  6 month cycle?
> > (except annma, of course).
> >
> > Please respond with any release date blockers you may know about in early
> > 2010. ie. sprints, meetings, conferences, ..
> >
> > let's block-off known bad dates first.
> 
> Do we want to depends on Qt 4.6 or not?
> 
> Few new feature of Qt Q 4.6 that might be interresting for KDE include: state 
> machine API, animation API, graphics effects, webkit improvement in case we 
> want the webkit part, mouse gestures, and more.
>   
> There is no official date for the release of Qt 4.6, but it should be should 
> be end of 2009 or early 2010.
> The alpha (technology preview) is planed in september.
> 
> So Qt seems to be schedguled a little bit before KDE. But Qt can possibly be 
> delayed if Nokia's QA think the release is not ready,  and we should not 
> forget that if we want to include new features, trunk (or at least part of it) 
> should start depending on Qt 4.6 earlier in the development process.  Is it OK 
> if trunk depends on alpha or beta of Qt? (we already did in in KDE 4.1)
> 

Maybe it is an idea to team up with Qt and try to release on the exact same day? Can give both a bunch of added publicity and would be nice to try. 

To let that work we might want to be a bit flexible on the release date I guess. We can do that. But we need to set a max date on which we are going to release anyways, even if Qt is not ready yet.
In return we need to know from Nokia something like two weeks before they are going to release (but then we depend on a TP of 4.6 for the 4.4.0 release, so might want to do a 4.4.1 quickly after that).

The advantage is not purely the big news splash but also an immediate real-world showcase for Qt 4.6. 

Just an idea.

Best,

Toma