Hi, Just to keep things in perspective, I saw this today:
(at the bottom) http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070827 -- Ken On Tuesday 28 August 2007 00:54:47 Troy Unrau wrote: > So, I've brought this proposal up once before, but here it is again > (in more concrete form, and no misleading terminology). This email > will make some people unhappy since it indicates that we will be > missing the Oct23rd date which is a nice date for historical reasons > only (KDE 2.0 was released on Oct 23rd as well). > > We will not be able to obtain a decent release on Oct 23rd despite > everyone's best wishes, including my own. Hell, the plasma panel will > miss this, the last beta, and unless the extra beta is inserted, will > never see the panel in a beta series release before Oct 23rd. > > So here are the adjustments I'd like to see made, on behalf of the > marketing working group, and for the general sanity of having a beta > with a mostly-functioning plasma before we freeze: > > 1) We add another beta into the release cycle pushing the release > candidates back. This ensures that we actually have a beta with the > plasma panel and not kicker. > 2) We add an additional two RC's (for a total of 4 RCs) to ensure that > the code works, and isn't a festering dung-heap when we release it. > 3) We call the Nov 22nd RC3 as the "KDE 4 Technology Platform > Release". We then take the extra month afforded by the additional RCs > for documentation, translations, unit tests, artwork and bugfixes ONLY > (deep freeze). > 4) We tag 4.0.0 just before Christmas, have a relatively quiet > announcement of 4.0.0 'being tagged', branch and reopen trunk. > 5) We announce the 4.0.0 release January 17th in Mountain View. The > distros have had four weeks to get a handle on it and they all have > packages ready to use. Some initial reviews and such will already be > live before our announcement. > > The new schedule would look like: > > September 25: 3.94 (KDE 4.0 Beta3) > October 23: Total Release Freeze > October 25: 3.96 (KDE 4.0 RC1) > November 8: 3.97 (KDE 4.0 RC2) > November 22: 3.98 (KDE 4.0 Technology Platform Release a.k.a. RC3) > December 6: 3.99 (KDE 4.0 RC4) > December 20: 4.0.0 tagged, is unannounced except to distros-- 4.0.x > branched, trunk unfreezes... > January 17: 4.0.0 announcement and release party > > If it makes you happy, think of the Technology Platform Release as > RC3, only we will at this point start to tell early adopters that it's > ready, and distros that like to live on the edge a little can use it. > > Here's why we care, in marketing, for the extra beta and RC's, even > though that means 4.0.0 is pushed back: > - stability is important - we can have all the cool features in the > world, but when we ship 4.0 out the door and the bad reviews come in > due to instability, we will have a long uphill battle against the > negative public perception that 4.0 is buggy. If we can pull off a > smooth 4.0 release, we can avoid much of the bad publicity. > - first impressions are important - if we don't have a relatively > polished release, the first reviews will be bad, and we'll not have a > drove of users trying out KDE for the first time. These reviews have > to be good for users to pay attention. > - people on IRC are calling this week's beta as alpha4 because of the > quality. Seriously folks, it's pretty bad. Some KDE community members > are recommending against using 4.0 already are claiming that they > won't even use it themselves. This is terrible for convincing people > to migrate early - having our own community complaining about the > release looks terrible. > > People will argue that a major point-oh release is never stable, but > really folks, can't we afford two extra months to make it worth > releasing? If anyone honestly believes that we'll need more than the > extra two months, we will need to reschedule the release party now > before flights are booked. > > Cheers folks _______________________________________________ release-team mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
