On Sunday 08 July 2007 21:47:21 Allen Winter wrote: > On Friday 06 July 2007 12:55:00 pm Troy Unrau wrote: > > I talked to many people at Akademy already about this idea, but Dirk > > suggested that I send it to the mailing list to make it a little more > > official and through official channels. > > Officially speaking as an official module release dude .... > > Huh? > My itty-bitty brain isn't grasping. > > Please take all the comments and make a new set of milestones > and a new roadmap. Please define new codewords like "mountainview" > and "gamma".
"Mountainview" is the working name for the release party which will be hosted by Google. "Gamma" is a real release, but not targeted at new end users (so it really *is* 4.0, and *not* a release candidate. That thing has to be very clear. Troy's proposal, however, is about making a marketing splash about something that is technically 4.0.1 or 4.0.2 (so it has some fixes for critical bugs, polishing of default settings, some smaller usability improvements, more complete translations and a more comprehensive set of applications. The "End User Release" will get a cool name, a version number is quite technical, which is also something we want to address. Think of Windows XP (which really is 5.something), just as an example that the version number itself doesn't matter much. So why call it Gamma, and not final? - A 4.0 release, especially in the case of KDE will have glitches. Those glitches might be acceptable for our current user base, but they're certainly not to new target groups that we're looking at for KDE4. We're pushing KDE4 into the mainstream market which is much more critical about small glitches. (This is based on research into target group characteristics, which I'm happy to share if you want.) - Right now, it's quite hard for usability and accessibility people to review KDE4, too much is moving. Same goes for translators. We need a real release for those people to contribute in a meaningful way. (The lack of people participating in HIG hunting shows this quite well.) - KDE 4.0 will miss quite some applications, we might be able to ship a basic set, but certainly not the comprehensive desktop we'd like to have ready. - The release event needs some very time-critical planning. If we slip the release, months of work will be ruined. (Imagine booking plane tickets for people to visit the release event, having everything in place, just not the release itself.) - Marketing KDE4 towards the end-user, but giving distros virtually no time (well, one week) to prepare a finished product renders it vapourware (it's not available at that point). So technically, from a developer's point of view, it doesn't really change all that much. I think that the proposal is very sensible since it solves a number of very real problems we're facing. I feel this email is getting to long, so I'll address concern in future emails where I can, but leave it at that for now. In any case, I would like to ask you (the release team) to have a good look and think at it and support it. -- sebas http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious. - Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ release-team mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
