Hi! Thank you for contacting the HCI workgroup for feedback about the planned release schedule. It is a very good sign that the release team is planning to give the KDE4 development work more structure, so I welcome the initiative to create a clear release plan.
Some adjustments seem necessary to properly deal with the needs of the various HCI teams. The following comments are my summary of discussions I had with several members of the HCI workgroup (mainly accessibility and usability) during the last hours. > On the release-team mailing list we are currently planning a release > schedule for KDE 4.0. Basically the current planning means that the > kdelibs API is frozen in about a month, How will this freeze be handled? At aKademy, the HCI workgroup pushed for a close cooperation and coordination between all workgroups (marketing, HCI, TWG, sysadmin at the time) when planning the KDE 4 release. We had a common meeting of all workgroups, where we agreed to have a list of features and API changes that are considered "showstoppers" from the perspective of the usability/artwork/localisation/accessibility teams. The TWG was then replaced by the release team, and we assumed that the release team would contact us and inform us about the location of this list, so that we can add content early enough for the release. I am sorry for not contacting the release team myself about this point. I had no idea that you were planning to announce the API freeze with only one month of warning. The plan to freeze the API is OK IMHO if features listed in the "showstopper" list can be implemented later. We can try to document all areas with necessary API changes within one month, but we will need additional time to pursuade developers to implement the needed changes. This additional time can be bigger or shorter, depending on how much the release team is willing to support us in these finding developers. Some important topics that need to be part of this list are: * Reworked colour theme system (I posted a document draft several times on kde-core-devel; we can try to complete the colour theme document within one week) * Qt 4.3 contains some layout system changes that are needed for usability improvements. * Qt Accessibility Framework: In middle-term perspective, all widgets in kde*libs and kdebase should provide the Qt Accessibility Framework with the necessary information to allow their use by users with disabilities (screen readers etc). The Qt Accessibility Framework changes in Qt 4.3 are done by Harald Fernengel and other Trolltech developers, so we depend on the Qt 4.3 schedule. Harald, would it be possible for someone at Trolltech to complete a kde*libs/kdebase widget API review for accessibility needs within one month? * Consistent and complete keyboard navigation of all of KDE (we still need to evaluate whether this has any influence on the API) * There might be a number of other (smaller) areas where API changes could be necessary for usability. The usability team does not consist of developers, so it will take some time and cooperation to complete this review. > a feature freeze in early May, Does the feature freeze include changes as a result of usability reviews? Or would it be possible to explicitly allocate time in the schedule to fix usability and accessibility problems (rather than "hard" bugs only)? > and a release around October A quick stable release for kdelibs and kdebase/runtime seems to make sense, but an end-user release in October seems to be unrealistic. The user interface of important parts of KDE4 (e.g. Plasma, Nepomuk) does not exist yet and the usability team needs time to conduct a proper usability review of the new interfaces. KDE 4.0 will be reviewed as a Vista competitor, and it would make a disastrous impression if core elements of the user interface are either not present yet or have an extremely bad usability because of a rushed schedule. It would also make a disastrous impression if important desktop applications (e.g. kdepim) are missing from the KDE 4.0 end user release. Would it be possible to have a stable developer API release in October, but to release "KDE 4.0" as an end user desktop only after all important tasks are completed? (Is there any feedback from the marketing team on this?) Olaf _______________________________________________ release-team mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
