Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
In <49E4AA69.60507@att.net>, Duaine & Laura Hechler wrote:
It's beginning to sound like the devs for KDE 4 are "doing the MS way".
Yes, we know there are bugs - however - it's good enough - so - we're going to release it anyway.
That's not a MS-ism. That's a core open-source philosophy: "Release early; release often.".
Yes, release early and often into the unstable, constantly evolving repositories for developers and committed testers...not release early and often into the stable branches...and if that is the belief of the KDE team, to release early and often to end users, then I think they have a different understanding of the meaning of release early and often than most of use in the Linux world do.
Also, while it was a bit lost in the hullabaloo around the releases, KDE 4.0 was released as "for developers only" and KDE 4.1 was released as "for early adopters". I stayed away from these releases, and I'm quite happy with KDE 4.2. ...
Yes, and KDE 4.1 was the default/preferred interface for 11.1, and I consider myself "an early adopter" but I either want something reasonably quickly fixed in that version, or it isn't ready for prime time beyond the committed community. I was an early adopter of 11.1, but nowhere else did encounter problems anything like what happened with 4.1...frankly, it was not ready for prime time, but spokesperson for the KDE team said that they felt it was necessary for them to have a larger base to test on in order to debug it faster. Sorry, as an early adopter, I agreed that I might get some bugs, but also felt that part of the deal was that the developers were seeking feedback from those adopters, not just bug reports and silence about problems that go well beyond the usual buglist.
In summary, I'd say that KDE 4.2.2 is stable but not feature complete. I'm not sure 4.3 will be feature complete either--there are a lot of missing features. And many of those features are features that we, as users, rely on, so if we are forced or led to become early adopters, at least we should have a reasonable expectation that the look and feel can be altered gradually, as I learn it, not all or nothing style.
Of course some thing people are
considering missing features aren't part of KDE. E.g. k3b, amarok, kdiff3, and kaffeine aren't "part of KDE", they are simply applications that use the KDE libraries. Surely no one expects the KDE developers to improve ALL the applications that use the libraries they produced.
That's right, most of us don't expect the KDE developers to improve these add-on packages. That is not the only issue, and it cannot be repeatedly brought up as if it is the only, or the principal, source of frustrations.
It will be unfortunate if openSUSE stops security support for KDE 3.5.10 before KDE 4 is feature complete AND stable.
The whole way KDE 3 and its user base are being treated is unfortunate. And it leave me feeling I made an unfortunate choice at my last major upgrade, whether I went with KDE3 or KDE4, precisely because the team stresses over and over that they can only support KDE4, and that we as users need to run an incomplete and often unstable version long enough for them to get it to where they want to. And even then, wait longer before the add-on packages can catch up to the library changes. And a last minute commitment to 3.5.10, given the historical record, isn't enough to restore my faith that I will be able to continue on that path for as long as I choose, until I say I am satisfied with both the KDE, and its add-ons. I have read the arguments about why the API's to the libraries had to change so radically, and that piece I do understand and accept, although I would prefer that it weren't necessary. But the corollary is that I feel that I should have the right to a stable and secure, and addon-complete, yes -- until such time as I, not they, feel KDE4 has reached that state. Now if KDE4 had been running with lots of happy and impressed users for some time, stable and secure, I could understand if they didn't want me to continue to drain their resources with support for 3. But while KDE4 hasn't been stable long enough for a reasonable stabilization of the addons to occur -- heck, it isn't even there itself now, at 4.2, and isn't likely to be there even in 4.3. Doesn't that imply that serious addon migrations will only begin when we get to 4.4, or whatever release is relatively stable and secure, especially in the API and test reproducibility areas? So a year or more til the DE is stable and secure, and six months more maybe for addons to come onboard, lets see, have I really been hearing a commitment to fully support KDE3 until then? If that is the position, it needs to be explicitly committed to by the team, before I am willing to run KDE 3 or 4 for the next year and half, or more. -- Dan Goodman Senior Systems Administrator -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org