Re: [kde] KDE's rough edges... what are your experiences?
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:54:50AM +0100, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Thursday, 2013-10-31, 11:48:10, Michael wrote: Am Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:34:56 +0100 schrieb Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org: On Wednesday, 2013-10-30, 18:00:46, Michael wrote: And on the thread itself, I did not talk about any applications, I only speak of the UI + widgets and its issues. I know the threshold might be fuzzy there sometimes. Right. There are more precise ways to address different products, e.g. Plasma desktop or Plasma workspace(s), but anything than using the project/vendor name is usally already an improvement. So, KDE4 is officially abandoned, great! :-( No. As explained in short and in length :) From what I wanted to know, it generally is. That not all-and-everything KDE-related is obsolete is quite clear. I guess it also depends on the definition of abandoned. Usually that means discarded or remaining untouched, etc. If we define abandoned as no new extensions that is of course a different case. Cheers, Kevin My main concern with 4 is not whether features are being added but whether bugs are being removed. What are the prospects for that? And has anything been done in the KDE5 cycle to assure higher levels of reliability? Ross Boylan ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Thursday, May 09, 2013 08:32:10 PM James Tyrer wrote: On 05/07/2013 02:40 PM, Ross Boylan wrote: I too am finding the reliability of KDE and its apps not what I would like, but one thing puzzles me about this complaint, the statement that bug fixing is not welcomed... On Tuesday, May 07, 2013 02:54:19 AM James Tyrer wrote: The KDE development team appears to be interested in something other than producing a stable release. It really is that simple. As a result, the release process is not oriented towards producing a stable release. I'm not sure if the developers would agree, though most developers would rather make new things than fix old ones. They are supposedly fixing lots of bugs with each release; it's just there are so many. I have to, possibly, correct you here, and this is indicative of the problem. Is the tally of bugs fixed or of bugs closed? I understand that you and others ran into problems that were sufficiently serious and numerous to get you really annoyed. You may think, and I might agree, that software shouldn't have been released in such a state. But by your own admission you don't know what going on with the bugs fixed or closed. So perhaps you shouldn't blame the developers for something that you don't even know is happening. The 4.3 release notes http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/ refers to over 10,000 bugs fixed (vs 2,000 feature requests). Now maybe they are counting closed for all reasons as fixed, but they said fixed. It surely does not suggest a project devoting it all its resources to making new stuff. You complained KDE doesn't care about quality, the 4.9 release notes http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.9/ note he KDE Quality Team was set up earlier this year with a goal to improve the general levels of quality and stability in KDE software. The Team also set up a more rigorous testing process for releases starting with beta versions In short, you seem to have taken your experiences and developed a theory of the motivation and goals of the developers and the project. But your theory doesn't fit the facts too well. Maybe there is insufficient emphasis on software quality. But you make it easy to ignore your criticisms when you make over the top statements that KDE doesn't care about quality. Doesn't the existence of so many bugs tend to illustrate my point? Well, software has bugs. I'm not sure a bug count is a great quality metric, but bug-free software is an impossible standard. .. I find very useful the dystopian novel: The Rise of the Meritocracy which is a critique of the idea of the meritocracy. A meritocracy is defined by the search for merit -- but that is dependent on the definition of merit. I find that I have no merit in the KDE project despite the fact that I went to college and studied EE and computer science. In the KDE project, you obtain merit be designing a new application. So, that is the nail that everyone is hitting with their hammer. Where do you get the idea that you have no merit in the KDE project, or that someone fixing bugs would be greeted with anything other than enthusiasm? Well, it's free software and so there's bound to be some static, but apart from that :) I was bluntly told so by a developer -- that formal education in software development was not considered. And also told that I needed to write an application to obtain merit. merit in this context is not something I'm familiar with, but then I'm not a KDE developer. Apparently your annoyance in turned annoyed others, which may have prompted some harsh remarks. Individual developerrs do not speak with the voice of the entire project. The project desktop doesn't need another application. It needs thousands of bugs fixed. Better yet, it needs Total Quality Management methods to prevent the buts ever entering the code base -- hacking replaced with design as a method of writing code. And, self taught hackers and beginners mentored in how to write better code. Writing an application, will not accomplish these things. Note that I am one of those that needs some mentoring. It seems unrealistic to expect mentoring from people you are insulting, particularly when your insults are on shakey factual ground. Ross I am a whiz at writing procedural code. I have learned the basics of C++ on a micro (inside a class) basis, but I could use some help learning the fine points of the macro structure of object oriented code. Actually, this is why I find it interesting that I find that people that have learned C++ seem to know the macro structure but often don't write the small pieces of procedural code that do the actual work of the program well. BTW, I still use Thunderbird. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Tuesday, May 07, 2013 04:21:21 PM Duncan wrote: P.S. Composed in kmail 1.13.7, which mysteriously hangs from time to time, can't autocomplete from the address book, and sometimes show blank messages with any way I can see to get it show html. Kmail-1 is an effectively abandoned product. While it continued to work with newer kde for awhile, and my distro, gentoo, continued to offer both the pre-akonadified kdepim-4.4.x and the newer version in parallel for awhile (so the admins of individual installations could choose which they wanted), without anyone officially adopting and continuing to maintain the pre-akonadi version, that's getting tough to maintain as mainline kde progresses farther away, leaving kdepim-4.4 (with kmail-1) further and further behind and stale. I'm using Debian Wheezy, which was released about 2 days ago. It's a little odd: help | about shows KMail Version 1.13.7 use KDE dev Platform 4.8.4. The Debian package version number is 4.4.11, which I suppose is a reference to the kde pim version. I'm guessing the Debian packagers thought KMail 2 was too unreliable, at least when they made the packaging decision, which would have been quite a biit before the release. Maybe some of the problems like the address book non-lookup are from mixing KMail one with a later general KDE release. Ross ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Wednesday, May 08, 2013 12:55:25 AM Georg C. F. Greve wrote: On Tuesday 07 May 2013 23.04:02 Ross Boylan wrote: I'm using Debian Wheezy, which was released about 2 days ago. It's a little odd: help | about shows KMail Version 1.13.7 use KDE dev Platform 4.8.4. The Debian package version number is 4.4.11, which I suppose is a reference to the kde pim version. That would explain a lot of the problems right there. .. But criticising the 4.10 release on a weird mix of packages from 4.4 and 4.8 that was hand-grafted by some packagers who thought they knew better seems like going out of ones way to do some trolling against KDE, to be honest. If you review the thread history you'll see I didn't start it or pick the subject line; I don't believe the original poster was on Debian. We have wandered onto my problems with KDE and KMail because I mentioned my problems with them while questioning some of the original criticisms of KDE. As for Debian, I'm sure the packagers did the best they could with the choices they had. It's worth reiterating that, given the lag times involved in releases, they would have had to settle on things well before the release. By most accounts I've seen the newer kdepim packages had a rocky start. Ross ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
I too am finding the reliability of KDE and its apps not what I would like, but one thing puzzles me about this complaint, the statement that bug fixing is not welcomed... On Tuesday, May 07, 2013 02:54:19 AM James Tyrer wrote: The KDE development team appears to be interested in something other than producing a stable release. It really is that simple. As a result, the release process is not oriented towards producing a stable release. I'm not sure if the developers would agree, though most developers would rather make new things than fix old ones. They are supposedly fixing lots of bugs with each release; it's just there are so many. .. I find very useful the dystopian novel: The Rise of the Meritocracy which is a critique of the idea of the meritocracy. A meritocracy is defined by the search for merit -- but that is dependent on the definition of merit. I find that I have no merit in the KDE project despite the fact that I went to college and studied EE and computer science. In the KDE project, you obtain merit be designing a new application. So, that is the nail that everyone is hitting with their hammer. Where do you get the idea that you have no merit in the KDE project, or that someone fixing bugs would be greeted with anything other than enthusiasm? Well, it's free software and so there's bound to be some static, but apart from that :) I don't want to do that. I want to improve applications. That is what engineers do; we find the faults with things and fix them -- we improve things. Unfortunately, everyone designing new applications from square one is not conducive to building a stable and bug free desktop environment. You can see how this has contributed to the failure of KDE 4. Much of KDE 3 was thrown away rather than being improved and some of what was kept was either not improved (e.g. Konqueror) or the internals were replaced to the point that they became new apps with the old names. It takes time to build a code base. Plasma is getting nowhere. It is new, but it is still unstable at the pre-Beta state. The DeskTop can't even remember a configuration. Contrast this with the Japanese system of product development which is one of constant improvement. Apple has has some success with it. There is nothing wrong with KDE that a few committed software engineers -- committed to quality -- couldn't fix. But, I don't think that the hackers would like it. Continuous improvement will not immediately yield a stable product if there are a lot of problems, as there seem to be. I'm sure even one person could make a difference. I'm not sure even a small group could get things under control reasonably quickly. Ross Boylan P.S. Composed in kmail 1.13.7, which mysteriously hangs from time to time, can't autocomplete from the address book, and sometimes show blank messages with any way I can see to get it show html. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
