Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On 05/12/2013 05:13 AM, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Friday, 2013-05-10, James Tyrer wrote: On 05/07/2013 02:40 PM, Ross Boylan wrote: On Tuesday, May 07, 2013 02:54:19 AM James Tyrer wrote: 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. Well, that is easy enough to prove wrong :) Even among the developers only a few have ever written a new application and none of those who contribute through other ways than writing code have. Obviously whoever made that claim might believe it to be true, e.g. not having been part of the community long enough to know about other examples. You are absolutely correct and I agree with you. That is my point. However, the perception remains that writing the code for an application and in particular writing an application is the way to obtain merit in KDE. This a perception that I feel needs changing. -- James Tyrer Linux (mostly) From Scratch ___ 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 Friday, 2013-05-10, James Tyrer wrote: On 05/07/2013 04:21 PM, Duncan wrote: As Kevin keeps hammering hammering on, KDE isn't a single product. There are many that would (wrongly) say the same about Linux, which clearly isn't the case, or about Adobe (his example, very good one BTW), or even about Windows or MS, when the bug's actually in MS Office (not MS Windows) or even in Adobe's PDF reader or something else only related to MS Windows in that it runs on the platform. Kevin's comments are both correct and irrelevant. It is true that there are now KDE based applications that are outside the realm of the Desktop and associated applications. Should they be associated with the Desktop regarding the stable release issue. Well, that is a good question. My guess is that this (all-at-once-releases) will not be continued at the next major release cycle. My personal guess is topic bundles, e.g. KDE Games compilation, KDE Edu bundle, etc. But, lets only consider the D Desktop Environment so as to not beg the question with other issues. That's a reasonable increment in accuracy. The more sensitive question is whether someone fixing bugs would be greeted with anything other than enthusiasm. Yes, that is the question. What do you think? Do developers welcome someone fixing bugs -- fixing bugs in their code, or do they take bug reports personally and resent people posting patches to fix bugs in their code? Would they rather have the bug go unfixed than to have someone else fix it? Hard to say, I am not involved with any code of the desktop environment or workspace products. Prefering a bug to stay unfixed over having someone else fix it would be very uncommon though when compared to projects I am involved with to which I do follow more closely. There it is quite usual that one can see review requests from until then unknown people. Sometimes such persons contribute a series of fixes, sometimes it is just that single issue they personally really needed to have fixed :-) If I find time I'll see if I can look more closely at interaction patterns in the workspace area. I do see a lot of review requests on respective mailing lists but those could all be from active developers. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Friday, 2013-05-10, James Tyrer wrote: On 05/07/2013 02:40 PM, Ross Boylan wrote: On Tuesday, May 07, 2013 02:54:19 AM James Tyrer wrote: 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. Well, that is easy enough to prove wrong :) Even among the developers only a few have ever written a new application and none of those who contribute through other ways than writing code have. Obviously whoever made that claim might believe it to be true, e.g. not having been part of the community long enough to know about other examples. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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:
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On 05/10/2013 10:58 AM, Ross Boylan wrote: 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. I am asking you the question: fixed or closed? 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. I reference the Commit Digests which shows Bugs Closed, not fixed: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2013-04-28/ This is the wrong metric for merit -- the wrong contingency for reinforcement. 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 I do not say that KDE is not interested in quality. That is a misreading of what I said. What I said is that many developers are more interested in new features than a stable and bug free product. The result is a product which is never more than 90% finished. Testing is good. But, testing does not address the type of bugs that we are probably discussing. Testing can prevent regressions and it can check to see if new software conforms to the specifications. Some types of testing can catch specific types of coding errors. But, it can not find all types of bugs. If the KDE Quality Team is really focused on quality control, this is a good sign. However, there has been a KDE Quality Team for some time: http://dot.kde.org/2004/03/02/announcing-kde-quality-team and it wasn't exactly focused on quality control. 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. I think that with more research you will find evidence to support my position. 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. Don't misunderstand ironic statements or dry humor. 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. That isn't really a true statement but I take your point. However, there are various types of bugs. The type that it is correct to say that about are things that don't work as expected despite the fact that all coding is correct. Yes, the only way to find these is to write the software and then find them. On the other end of the scale are coding errors and code that simply can't work. Basically code that should have never been placed in the code base. It is this later type of bug that I am talking about. That is what I am advocating Total Quality Management for developers to avoid so that they don't need to be fixed. It is much less work in the long run to use TQM to avoid bugs entering the code base rather than allowing bugs (which are coding or design errors) to be committed and then trying to find them through testing (later), after the fact, by someone else (or users) and then fixing them. Detroit found out that this wasn't the way to build cars -- wasn't the way to do quality control. SNIP people you are insulting Well, that is part of the problem, people taking objective analysis -- my expressing my opinion -- as a personal insult. It most certainly is not. No insult is meant
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On 05/07/2013 09:06 AM, Doug wrote: On 05/07/2013 11:49 AM, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Tuesday, 2013-05-07, dE wrote: There is no misconception. Yes, there is. Sometimes people don't know that KDE is the name of the software vendor, not of a product and that this vendor has in fact dozens of products. S /snip/ I thought KDE was short for K Desktop Environment, a replacement for a Unix CDE--Common Desktop Environment? And obviously, that is what I was talking about. This attempt to change what KDE is, which I don't fully understand, isn't really relevant to the question. If we take what Kevin says as a fact, then it is just begging the question and then we need to talk about the Desktop and associated applications produced by KDE, the software vendor. -- James Tyrer Linux (mostly) From Scratch -- James Tyrer Linux (mostly) From Scratch ___ 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 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? Doesn't the existence of so many bugs tend to illustrate my point? .. 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. 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. 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. -- James Tyrer Linux (mostly) From Scratch ___ 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 05/07/2013 04:21 PM, Duncan wrote: Ross Boylan posted on Tue, 07 May 2013 14:40:50 -0700 as excerpted: 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 Kevin keeps hammering hammering on, KDE isn't a single product. There are many that would (wrongly) say the same about Linux, which clearly isn't the case, or about Adobe (his example, very good one BTW), or even about Windows or MS, when the bug's actually in MS Office (not MS Windows) or even in Adobe's PDF reader or something else only related to MS Windows in that it runs on the platform. Kevin's comments are both correct and irrelevant. It is true that there are now KDE based applications that are outside the realm of the Desktop and associated applications. Should they be associated with the Desktop regarding the stable release issue. Well, that is a good question. But, lets only consider the D Desktop Environment so as to not beg the question with other issues. 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. [Paragraph immediately below moved from elsewhere to address along with the next one in reply to the above.] 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... 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 :) Without trying to get too personal in my reply (which I should say explicitly is simply personal opinion), there's a bit of interpersonal history here that you evidently aren't aware of. He came across rather strongly on a few bugs, with the devs in charge of those products reacting defensively to what they saw as demands he had no right to make as a result. Regardless of the merits of the individual bugs and proposed fixes (which I'm staying neutral on), the unfortunate result is that now certain devs prefer to stay as far away from involvement with him and anything he proposes as possible. That looks a bit like spin. Spin is based on facts, but it is still spin. The fact remains that developers appear to resent users demanding that bugs be fixed. That statement has little to do with me since lots of users have done it and continued to do it even after I quite reporting bugs. The more sensitive question is whether someone fixing bugs would be greeted with anything other than enthusiasm. Yes, that is the question. What do you think? Do developers welcome someone fixing bugs -- fixing bugs in their code, or do they take bug reports personally and resent people posting patches to fix bugs in their code? Would they rather have the bug go unfixed than to have someone else fix it? This appears to be part of a common human failing that I have experienced in other contexts in other volunteer organizations. Specifically, I find that with my Homeowners' Association that people on the Board of Directors often resent it when someone with some expertise, or someone that has taken the time to research a subject, tries to give them advice on a subject -- in effect tells them how to do something; but are really only giving expert advice. No, they would rather do it their way without any interference from anyone else. -- James Tyrer Linux (mostly) From Scratch -- James Tyrer Linux (mostly) From Scratch ___ 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 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 Tuesday, 2013-05-07, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote: On Tuesday 07 May 2013 12:50 my mailbox was graced by a message from Kevin Krammer who wrote: So Adobe - vendor Adobe Creative Suite - bundle of products by vendor Adobe Photoshop - one product by vendor, also available as part of a bundle KDE - vendor KDE Software Compiliation - bundle of products by vendor KDE Digikam - one product by vendor, also available as part of a bundle With the profound difference that when you install Photoshop, frinstance, that is it; while if you want to install KMail, you are obliged to install as well a shitload of useless bug-ridden crap like Akonadi. There is very little difference. Either program will need its components to be present and working. If those components are part of a single package/installer or sharable between applications coming from an advanced software deployment system only changes how often the user has to download and install those components. Sharing of common components is one of the strengths of bundles on systems without software dependency management facilities, because they'll only contain those components once. One of the most widely known bundles, Microsoft Office, even reflects that in its installer. Individual applications can be selected for installation, the common components are always selected. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Tuesday 07 May 2013 19:21 my mailbox was graced by a message from Duncan who wrote: Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions... Another possibility: users will go over to Claws-mail (or other MUA), and drop KDE completely, some with a sigh of relief... Cheers, Ron. -- Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n'écoute, il faut toujours recommencer. -- A. Gide -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org -- ___ 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 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. I'm guessing the Debian packagers thought KMail 2 was too unreliable, KDE PIM packaging is notoriously bad, that is true. Often packagers think they know better than the developers. Or start to believe the fashionable KDE PIM bashing. The result is packaging that introduces issues that truly make it a horrible experience. But in those cases, the more truthful title for the thread would be that it is yet another failed Debian release. Even though that's also not quite correct, because it's not all of Debian that's bad. But as far as generalisations go, it'd be more truthful. The distribution with the best KDE packaging right now seems to be Fedora, at least that's my experience, and from 4.10 onward, KDE PIM has started fulfilling many of the promises this technology has been making. 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. Best regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve gr...@fsfeurope.org Member of the General Assembly http://fsfe.org/about/greve/ http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/ http://identi.ca/greve signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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, 2013-05-08, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote: On Tuesday 07 May 2013 19:21 my mailbox was graced by a message from Duncan who wrote: Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions... Another possibility: users will go over to Claws-mail (or other MUA), and drop KDE completely, some with a sigh of relief... I doubt Claws or any mail user agent can provide the same functionality of all KDE [1] software products people are currently using. Might be able to replace KMail, but I have my doubts on whether they would be able to work as a desktop shell, a document viewer, file manager, browser, calendar, text editor, etc. Cheers, Kevin [1] assuming for a moment that you accidentally used the vendor name to refer to all software products of said vendor -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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?
В письме от 7 мая 2013 19:56:32 пользователь Renaud Olgiati написал: On Tuesday 07 May 2013 19:21 my mailbox was graced by a message from Duncan who wrote: Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions... Another possibility: users will go over to Claws-mail (or other MUA), and drop KDE completely, some with a sigh of relief... Cheers, Ron. Just stop crying, men! Somebody drop something for another thing... It is just his troubles. What are you waiting for? That KDE will make software you will like? Or people starts like what you like? I use ONLY kde after their 4.1 release and I love it so much! Yes, there are some troubles, Yes, there are some bugs. But it is DE which going forward! It's more important than stability. You can take group of software and make it as stable as you need, but it is more difficult to improve this software and make it more usable. Kde now is that DE which can provide everything you want in one great and powerfull envirement, which you can customize as you wish. No one DE can do this so. If somebody goes to claws - it is not mean that kmail is bad or akonadi is wrong way. I love it and my big thanks for that people, who develop it! Any time with any changes - there are many people, that can't understand and take in new things, it is people's nature. But changes are needed and I belive that kde's team goes in right way. Yes, they are make misstakes and sometime creates more problems. But which of NEW-makers doesn't? KDE4 is not just new version of old DE. It is new look for pc's daily using. And I'm glad for possibility to be the one of the pioneers of this really great DE and it's features! P.S.: Sorry for my english and your mind which has suffered by my message, but I'm really tired of such whiny posts... ___ 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 08 May 2013 05:36 my mailbox was graced by a message from Kevin
Krammer who wrote:
I doubt Claws or any mail user agent can provide the same functionality of
all KDE [1] software products people are currently using.
Might be able to replace KMail, but I have my doubts on whether they would
be able to work as a desktop shell, a document viewer, file manager,
browser, calendar, text editor, etc.
[1] assuming for a moment that you accidentally used the vendor name to
refer to all software products of said vendor
Well, this is the problem: I am not looking for all the functionalities of
KDE, just looking for a mail client, to add to the small install on a palmtop
with limited HD capacity, and thought of KMail which I use daily on the
desktop.
So I try urpmi kmail, and find it wants to install almost 300 Mb of software
(in 137 packages) just to add Kmail to a non-KDE install...{1]
Hence my reference to bloatware, which seems to have offended in which case I
would present my apologies, and say I did not wish to offend, just state a
fact.
Cheers,
Ron.
1 For comparison, an urpmi claws-mail takes up 15 Mb with 8 packages.
--
Nous avons tous assez de force
pour supporter les maux d'autrui.
-- Duc de Larochefoucault
-- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --
___
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, 2013-05-08, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote: On Wednesday 08 May 2013 05:36 my mailbox was graced by a message from Kevin Krammer who wrote: I doubt Claws or any mail user agent can provide the same functionality of all KDE [1] software products people are currently using. Might be able to replace KMail, but I have my doubts on whether they would be able to work as a desktop shell, a document viewer, file manager, browser, calendar, text editor, etc. [1] assuming for a moment that you accidentally used the vendor name to refer to all software products of said vendor Well, this is the problem: I am not looking for all the functionalities of KDE, just looking for a mail client, to add to the small install on a palmtop with limited HD capacity, and thought of KMail which I use daily on the desktop. I was just commenting on the overreach of the statement. As a vendor with dozens of products, KDE has a lot of offerings people use while they are not using others. As I wrote yesterday, statements similar to that often spring from a fundamental misunderstanding about multi product vendors in the FOSS world or can lead an unprepared audience into such misunderstandings. Hence the need to add more context. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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?
Renaud (Ron) Olgiati posted on Tue, 07 May 2013 19:56:32 -0400 as excerpted: On Tuesday 07 May 2013 19:21 my mailbox was graced by a message from Duncan who wrote: Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions... Another possibility: users will go over to Claws-mail (or other MUA), and drop KDE completely, some with a sigh of relief... There's some irony there. I too am a claws-mail user there, having migrated to it with kde 4.7 after asking myself one day after yet another kmail/akonadi crash with loss of message (that I could probably recover, but that was the point, why did I NEED to do this, REPEATEDLY?!). The irony is that back in late 2001/early 2002 when I migrated from MS and MSOE to Linux and kmail, it had come down to either kmail or the then sylpheed-claws for mail, and I chose kmail. Had I made the other choice at that point, I'd have not had the whole hassle of switching back to it when kmail akonadified/jumped-the-shark. The second irony is that back in the late kde3 era, along about 3.5.8 or so, I had only a couple gtk-based apps and was investigating trying to drop them and thus be able to drop gtk from my (gentoo, so I build all updates, making unnecessary extra packages a lot more expensive a choice than on a binary distro) system entirely. Over the live of kde4, I dropped first one kde app and then another for gtk-based alternatives, until today all my big apps are gtk-based, with pretty much the kde/ plasma desktop itself, kwin, kdegames, and dolphin and gwenview, being the only kde stuff I have left. If I add qt, that adds vlc and smplayer2. That's it. On the gtk side I've always run pan as my news client (that was one of the gtk apps I was trying to dump, which was difficult as I'm involved with pan upstream as well, probably the biggest reason I did NOT dump all gtk), gtk-based firefox has replaced kde-based konqueror, and claws-mail has replaced both kmail and akregator. That's all my big apps. It be a lot less trouble now to dump kde and even qt entirely, than to dump gtk. There's gtk alternatives for vlc and smplayer2 or I could just keep qt, I already have gimv/gimageviewer installed which could replace gwenview, and the only kde games I use much are palapeli (puzzles) and kpat. There's certainly patience alternatives and I could drop palapeli, which leaves only dolphin and the plasma desktop itself, plus kwin. Razor-qt could replace plasma or I could research a gtk replacement, and I've liked what I read about enlightenment recently as well, so I'd surely look at that. I already use the mc/midnight-commander semi-gui for most file management, so dolphin's usage is mainly as the most convenient gui-file-manager association, making its replacement trivial. That leaves only kwin, but with some research (including looking at enlightenment as I mentioned above), that could be replaced as well. So both in mail client and in gtk vs kde/qt, I've come full circle since kde4, and am now closer to killing kde/qt than gtk. But on the other side, using so little kde has made it dramatically easier for me to run first the kde-prerelease betas and rcs, and now the live-branch git-kde (gentoo calls this version 4.x.49., with x being 10 ATM, thus 4.10.49., full trunk being simply denoted as version ). I'm rebuilding the limited kde I still run from sources every few days, taking under an hour to do so (20 minutes for a hot-cache rebuild) thanks to ccache and parallel-builds done in tmpfs (6-core AMD bulldozer fx6100 CPU, 16 gig RAM). Thus I got the updates that went into 4.10.3 shortly after they hit git, instead of waiting for the 4.10.3 release. It'd be a lot harder to do that if I was running nearly all kde based X- apps, as I was back in the kde3 era, both because there'd be a lot more to build in that case, and because I'd be risking the stability of more of my production-critical apps in the process. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ 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?
On Tuesday, 2013-05-07, James Tyrer wrote: On 03/19/2013 09:58 AM, dE . wrote: The KDE development team appears to be interested in something other than producing a stable release. It really is that simple. Well, simple and false :) Mostly because the conclusion is based on a misconception regarding KDE to be a single product. KDE is a software vendor with several dozend products, each developed by different people. Sometimes single developers, sometimes teams. Hence no such thing as a KDE development team exists as an entity by itself. As a result, the release process is not oriented towards producing a stable release. As a result obviously also false, i.e. a non-existing entity doesn't have goals. Unless we employ thinking similar religious faith and assume an unobservable entity exists by people believing in it ;-) 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. Also not true. Most contributors at KDE are neither the designers nor maintainers of applications. A lot of contributors are not even coders or not contributing other things than writing code. Merit is gauged by the quality, reliability and dedication to the contribution area. In other words merit and recognition is earned through actual contribution, but that contribution can be a lof ot things other than code. This applies to the work on KDE activities and products but also to the foundation managing KDE's legal assets, KDE e.V. As a sample, the e.V.'s board of directories has currently one member out of five who's active contribution at the moment is code. 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. Sounds like a great opportunity then :) Unfortunately, everyone designing new applications from square one is not conducive to building a stable and bug free desktop environment. While only a fraction of developer work on applications of the desktop environment product, I'd say that even this is a over generalisation even for those. The only two applications in that category that I can come up with from the top of my head which have been newly introduced are Plasma Desktop and Dolphin. Most others, e.g. KWin, Klipper, KMix, have existed for ages. And while some developers on some of these applications might be more adventurous than others or developers on non desktop environment applications, I hadn't had an issue with any of those in quite some time. 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. Well, being a conclusion based on a faulty analysis makes its content impossible to evaluate, but assuming for a moment that the analysis had not been wrong, then the only conclusion we could draw would be that there are either not software engineers committed to quality or that they have so far abstained from contributing their skills. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 05/07/13 20:03, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Tuesday, 2013-05-07, James Tyrer wrote: On 03/19/2013 09:58 AM, dE . wrote: The KDE development team appears to be interested in something other than producing a stable release. It really is that simple. Well, simple and false :) Mostly because the conclusion is based on a misconception regarding KDE to be a single product. KDE is a software vendor with several dozend products, each developed by different people. Sometimes single developers, sometimes teams. Hence no such thing as a KDE development team exists as an entity by itself. As a result, the release process is not oriented towards producing a stable release. As a result obviously also false, i.e. a non-existing entity doesn't have goals. Unless we employ thinking similar religious faith and assume an unobservable entity exists by people believing in it ;-) 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. Also not true. Most contributors at KDE are neither the designers nor maintainers of applications. A lot of contributors are not even coders or not contributing other things than writing code. Merit is gauged by the quality, reliability and dedication to the contribution area. In other words merit and recognition is earned through actual contribution, but that contribution can be a lof ot things other than code. This applies to the work on KDE activities and products but also to the foundation managing KDE's legal assets, KDE e.V. As a sample, the e.V.'s board of directories has currently one member out of five who's active contribution at the moment is code. 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. Sounds like a great opportunity then :) Unfortunately, everyone designing new applications from square one is not conducive to building a stable and bug free desktop environment. While only a fraction of developer work on applications of the desktop environment product, I'd say that even this is a over generalisation even for those. The only two applications in that category that I can come up with from the top of my head which have been newly introduced are Plasma Desktop and Dolphin. Most others, e.g. KWin, Klipper, KMix, have existed for ages. And while some developers on some of these applications might be more adventurous than others or developers on non desktop environment applications, I hadn't had an issue with any of those in quite some time. 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. Well, being a conclusion based on a faulty analysis makes its content impossible to evaluate, but assuming for a moment that the analysis had not been wrong, then the only conclusion we could draw would be that there are either not software engineers committed to quality or that they have so far abstained from contributing their skills. Cheers, Kevin ___ 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. There is no misconception. KDE is always giving problems. Look at the bugzilla crawling with stale bugs. I thought this thread was dead. ___ 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 Tuesday, 2013-05-07, dE wrote: There is no misconception. Yes, there is. Sometimes people don't know that KDE is the name of the software vendor, not of a product and that this vendor has in fact dozens of products. Sometimes people find these threads through search engines and might not yet know, so it is important to make sure they information is as accurate as possible. Most people don't have difficulties grasping the difference between a vendor and its multiple products, but they need to be aware of it first. A person who is not aware of Adobe having multiple products, ranging from Flash and Reader to Photoshop, InDesign, etc. might use the vendor name unknowingly while speaking about a specific product, making it hard for anyone else who knows more than one product to follow. Like when saying I found a bug in Adobe would not make a lot of sense for anyone knowing more than one Adobe product because the received information is so vague that it doesn't carry any value at all. KDE is always giving problems. Who? A single person or a group of individuals? Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 05/07/2013 11:32 AM, dE wrote: /snip/ There is no misconception. KDE is always giving problems. Look at the bugzilla crawling with stale bugs. /snip/ I've been using KDE for at least 3 years, and I find very little in it to complain about. Only thing I can think of is the unfortunate interaction of some programs (guvcview, most recently) with the operation of KSnapshot. Prior to that it was some other program, and prior to _that_, KSnapshot worked OK, so I don't know what or why they're doing things that louse it up. Oh, one other thing: some of the options set up in Configure Your Desktop do not survive reboot. I wish they'd fix that. The attitude that KDE is always giving problems could result in it being dropped by some distros in favor of some Ubuntuism, at which point I would just go back to Windows. I really dislike the way Windows operates, but i do like the Win (prior to Win8) screen paradigm, which KDE imitates rather well. --doug ___ 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 05/07/2013 11:49 AM, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Tuesday, 2013-05-07, dE wrote: There is no misconception. Yes, there is. Sometimes people don't know that KDE is the name of the software vendor, not of a product and that this vendor has in fact dozens of products. S /snip/ I thought KDE was short for K Desktop Environment, a replacement for a Unix CDE--Common Desktop Environment? If KDE is a software vendor, what else do they make? --doug ___ 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 Tuesday, 2013-05-07, Doug wrote: On 05/07/2013 11:49 AM, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Tuesday, 2013-05-07, dE wrote: There is no misconception. Yes, there is. Sometimes people don't know that KDE is the name of the software vendor, not of a product and that this vendor has in fact dozens of products. S /snip/ I thought KDE was short for K Desktop Environment, a replacement for a Unix CDE--Common Desktop Environment? Yes, initially. That initiative then attracted a lot of talented people from all kinds of interest areas, experts and enthusiasts from a wide range of problem domains, who all started contributing to their software needs as part of a larger community. Nowadays the desktop environment product, often also referred to as the desktop workspace product, is one of many, produced by dedicated group of individuals who find themselves intrigued by the graphical shell domain :) If KDE is a software vendor, what else do they make? The product range is quite wide, see http://kde.org/applications/ Productivity and Creativity applications, teaching and learning, entertainment, etc. Used by users of KDE's workspace products, other vendor's workspaces, free and proprietary operating systems, some even available on mobile devices (e.g. I have Kanagram, KHangman and Marble on my Nokia N9 smartphone). Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 07/05/2013 at 18:06, Doug dmcgarr...@optonline.net wrote: I thought KDE was short for K Desktop Environment, a replacement for a Unix CDE--Common Desktop Environment? It is not for over a three years now. KDE is simply KDE and the meaning is entire community. Software is called KDE SC, which means KDE *Software Compilation* - emphasis is put on fact that there are many programs, not just one. You can read more about it on: http://dot.kde.org/2009/11/24/repositioning-kde-brand But yes, KDE (community) has failed to bring this distinction to wider audience. Hell, I bet that even among long-term KDE community members there are many people not aware of official meaning of KDE and KDE SC. Of course there are much bigger problems in both KDE and KDE SC, so not wasting time on trying to teach people differences between two terms is not necessarily a bad thing. -- Best regards Mirosław Zalewski ___ 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 Tuesday, 2013-05-07, Mirosław Zalewski wrote: On 07/05/2013 at 18:06, Doug dmcgarr...@optonline.net wrote: I thought KDE was short for K Desktop Environment, a replacement for a Unix CDE--Common Desktop Environment? It is not for over a three years now. KDE is simply KDE and the meaning is entire community. Software is called KDE SC, which means KDE *Software Compilation* - emphasis is put on fact that there are many programs, not just one. Not quite. The distinction is far older than the initiative to enhance the accuracy in communications. Also the software is not called KDE SC, that name refers to the bundle containing all of KDE's software products. It was added as a compromise for occasions when even a list of product categories was deemed to long. Usage of that term will probably be discontinued though, it has created misconceptions on its own. As I mentioned in a different message to this thread, this is usually easily understood when comparing with vendors with a range of products of their own. Good example, as mention earlier, being Adobe. Adobe being the name of the vendor, often also used as a prefix on product names, e.g. Adobe Photoshop. Adobe's product range has dozens of items, one for example being Photoshop. That product is also available as part of a product bundle called Creative Suite. So Adobe - vendor Adobe Creative Suite - bundle of products by vendor Adobe Photoshop - one product by vendor, also available as part of a bundle KDE - vendor KDE Software Compiliation - bundle of products by vendor KDE Digikam - one product by vendor, also available as part of a bundle Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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'm surprised this post keeps coming up. I've been using KDE 4.6.0 since it was a stable release for some years now, I use Kmail too. Problems - virtually zero, some mouse gestures which don't seem to want to be disabled occasionally cause mild annoyance and that terrible indexing utility that logged everything I did and seemed bent on wearing out my hard drives just had to be disabled as much as it can be. It also slowed everything down. I run a fairly heavily loaded desktop and fairly recently started having disc thrashing problems. Added more memory and that has more or less gone away. The fact that it hasn't gone completely is down to me and my use and the memory capability of the motherboard. When I upgraded from KDE 3 I also had to fit a new graphics card to keep the effects running. It's nothing really special just a mid range cheap part from Nvidia - also most importantly had to add there driver. I might reboot/turn off my machine every 6 months or so. One gremlin. Some how closing an app on the task bar just offered me remove from taskbar - it did and the icon just wouldn't come back. In the end I deleted the task bar and added it again and all was ok. I suspect the answer to the complaints in these posts is to get real. Linux plus what ever has never ever been completely stable if people run the latest and greatest. Even less so if they compile something like KDE themselves or worse still build up everything from scratch. Distro's are intended to get round these problems according to the level people want. They always have been. Some people don't mind the bugs, others like me just want to use my machine and bug report on stable releases but not to KDE. There wouldn't be any point. I post to the distro. I suppose I have been using KDE plus linux for near 20 years now. If someone wants a truly upfront distro where others usually sort out problems quickly I would suggest they try Arch - if they have the ability but in that case they may be able to sort it out themselves.. Me well I will be upgrading shortly to another stable distro release - new machine too. I've been using this one for 10+ years John - From: dE de.tec...@gmail.com To: kde@mail.kde.org Sent: Tuesday, 7 May 2013, 16:32 Subject: Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release? On 05/07/13 20:03, Kevin Krammer wrote: On Tuesday, 2013-05-07, James Tyrer wrote: On 03/19/2013 09:58 AM, dE . wrote: The KDE development team appears to be interested in something other than producing a stable release. It really is that simple. Well, simple and false :) Mostly because the conclusion is based on a misconception regarding KDE to be a single product. KDE is a software vendor with several dozend products, each developed by different people. Sometimes single developers, sometimes teams. Hence no such thing as a KDE development team exists as an entity by itself. As a result, the release process is not oriented towards producing a stable release. As a result obviously also false, i.e. a non-existing entity doesn't have goals. Unless we employ thinking similar religious faith and assume an unobservable entity exists by people believing in it ;-) 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. Also not true. Most contributors at KDE are neither the designers nor maintainers of applications. A lot of contributors are not even coders or not contributing other things than writing code. Merit is gauged by the quality, reliability and dedication to the contribution area. In other words merit and recognition is earned through actual contribution, but that contribution can be a lof ot things other than code. This applies to the work on KDE activities and products but also to the foundation managing KDE's legal assets, KDE e.V. As a sample, the e.V.'s board of directories has currently one member out of five who's active contribution at the moment is code. 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. Sounds like a great opportunity then :) Unfortunately, everyone designing new applications from square one is not conducive to building a stable and bug free desktop environment. While only a fraction of developer work on applications of the desktop environment product, I'd say that even this is a over generalisation even for those. The only two applications in that category that I can come up with from the top of my head which have
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Tue, 7 May 2013 14:55:08 -0400 Renaud (Ron) Olgiati articulated: With the profound difference that when you install Photoshop, frinstance, that is it; while if you want to install KMail, you are obliged to install as well a shitload of useless bug-ridden crap like Akonadi Akonadi won't even start on my system. -- Jerry ♔ Disclaimer: off-list followups get on-list replies or get ignored. Please do not ignore the Reply-To header. __ ___ 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.
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
Ross Boylan posted on Tue, 07 May 2013 14:40:50 -0700 as excerpted: 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 Kevin keeps hammering hammering on, KDE isn't a single product. There are many that would (wrongly) say the same about Linux, which clearly isn't the case, or about Adobe (his example, very good one BTW), or even about Windows or MS, when the bug's actually in MS Office (not MS Windows) or even in Adobe's PDF reader or something else only related to MS Windows in that it runs on the platform. 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. [Paragraph immediately below moved from elsewhere to address along with the next one in reply to the above.] 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... 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 :) Without trying to get too personal in my reply (which I should say explicitly is simply personal opinion), there's a bit of interpersonal history here that you evidently aren't aware of. He came across rather strongly on a few bugs, with the devs in charge of those products reacting defensively to what they saw as demands he had no right to make as a result. Regardless of the merits of the individual bugs and proposed fixes (which I'm staying neutral on), the unfortunate result is that now certain devs prefer to stay as far away from involvement with him and anything he proposes as possible. But of course that doesn't and shouldn't prevent contributions to other kde-based projects, or indeed, /starting/ other independent but kde-based projects, if so desired. 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 believe gentoo/kde finally dropped kdepim-4.4 support recently, or if not, will be doing so shortly, citing as reasons the very bugs you mention above. It's simply getting too far behind to maintain compatibility with current kde any longer. Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions... unless someone steps up to adopt the abandoned code and bring it forward as a new, independent project. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ 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 Monday, 2013-03-25, dE . wrote: As stated before, the best way to find bugs is constant usability testing. Beta 1 and beta 2 have a few days in between releases, so what do you expect these testers to upgraded every day and yet use their system normally? Instead they attempt to just see if everything works externally, and upgrade to the next beta. The same happens with RC releases. These frequent releases cause confusion. By the time you find a bug for RC1, RC2 is already out, and the devs in the bugzilla will ask for you to upgrade. Who has that much of patience? The time between those test milestones is about two weeks. This is a compromise between convenience (packaged software) and relevance (not encountering issues already fixed in the mean time). Of course, ideally there would be tons of people running master, but experience shows that way more people are likely to test drive packaged software. So at some stage during the development cycle, a series of packaged milestones is offered for those who prefer this form of software distribution for testing. At some point it might be possible to do daily packages, but we haven't arrived at that yet. If you want constant usability testing, the target userbase should be somewhere between devs and end users; these people want a usable system, and don't mind testing. But for that to happen the releases should be slow, so it reaches them and it's convenient to them. But that's already the case, isn't it? It is basically up to each individual to chose their point of involvement. From running git pull --rebase every couple of minutes to upgrading packages every couple of months. The latter depending on the package source, varying between weeks (e.g. rolling release distro) to several years (LTS distro). Also real testing starts with RC after the freeze -- which ensures no new bugs. But unfortunately, there's not even a month between RC3 and the freeze -- how do you expect to find new bugs in a few weeks? Are you sure? For 4.10 I see the freeze happend on November 8th, R3 tagging on January 17th. About two months if my math doesn't fail me. Instead there should be 3 or 4 months between RCs, so bug can be collected and the RC releases reach across layers of users; it shouldn't happen that before the release reaches the user, it becomes outdated by 2 other releases. But wouldn't longer periods between RCs not mean that people encounter the same bugs over and over again instead of finding new bugs due to already known ones having been fixed? Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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, 2013-03-28, Kevin Chadwick wrote: On Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:21:47 +0100 Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: I certainly think freedesktop.org should change it's name perhaps to enterprisedesktop.org or maybe cloudesktop.org I didn't get the context of that one. Various projects have shown their disregard for the user base and preference for enterprise or cloud things like: Udisks - dropping support for 6 months for features people actually use in order to cater for sessions (it may be Arch using udisks2? before it should have done was the problem there however, Arch has some good but also terrible points) systemd - perhaps not a freedesktop.org spec? but it certainly abuses the freedesktop.org domain without allowing comments and has basically come from Red Hats want for spinning up VMs quickly, disregarding other priorities of the main user base. Well, I haven't had any problem with either, i.e. udisk working well and not using systemd yet, but neither is related to the freedesktop.org project or efforts, simply using the infrastructure for hosting. As far as I know the involved developers are mostly kernel/system level people who might have a different focus than end user application developers. I just don't think it would be worth the effort of building another infrastructure provider (repositories, mailinglist, bug trackers). Most likely new project that do not want to share infrastructure with established FOSS projects will nowadays go for github or gitorious (assuming they now also provide bug trackers and mailinglist). It doesn't suit the name freedesktop because it is forcing more and more dependencies such as polkit onto users when it could allow you to choose and change to whatever you want when you want like spacefm allows you to choose polkit/udisks, sudo/whatever with udevil etc.. Well, any kind of optional feature requires build time checks and guarded code section or the design, implementation and maintenance of a plugin system. Not all projects have the man power to do that and can then either decide not to do something or chose one possible way of doing it. For example KDE's Solid framework allows application developers access to disk/volume discovery/management on different base systems (HAL, udisk, udisk2), but that of course only helps application developers using Qt. Developers on other stacks, e.g. IIRC those working on Thunar filemanager, had to decide to drop HAL support. They certainly didn't do that without cause, they most likely decided on the best possible option regarding their use case and available resources. especially as I am skeptical of it being implemented well considering freedekstop.orgs history such as disregard for other opinions and anything non linux Hmm, can you point out a freedesktop.org spec which is bound to Linux? Qt and KDE implement most of them can run quite nicely on BSDs as far as I heard. I guess I am meaning freedesktop hosted and my above gripe may actually be with the desktop environment dependencies that have nothing to do with freedesktop.org specs but happens to be common to varying degrees to all the DEs that use the specs. Perhaps you could confirm that for me? Hosted projects do whatever they need to do to realize their goals. At some point in history it was consider political suicide to be hosted on e.g. GNOME or KDE infrastructure because tons of people would falsly assume all kinds of dependencies. We can still see this occasionally when Qt based application developers start implementing libraries that already exist, well tested and maintained, in KDE's git repositories. Going for neutral hosting was often an attempt to avoid that, especially when company run solutions like SourceForge where deemed unfit for whatever reason. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Friday, 2013-03-29, dE . wrote: See, we all agree with the fact that KDE SC is a complicated project and it's a good design; for starters Akonadi is the only piece of software proving the likes of MS exchange. But the project doesn't have enough developers to satisfy the release needs, especially if it's @ 6 months. Well, I concede that it is hard to see from an outside perspective and that attempts to clarify misconceptions are only helping tiny bits at a time, but I'll try again nevertheless :) The main point is, I think, that there is no such thing as a KDE SC project. Traditionally it was nice to have all products of KDE contributors from different problem domains as a set of source packages (and consequently as a set of binary packages) at somewhat predictable times. It has some nice implications like getting attention of user, distributors and reporters likewise, more than any of the single products, especially the smaller or more specialized ones, would get. The drawback is that this also generates some misconception regarding the development process, e.g. making it hard or impossible for outsiders to see that each product has its own development speed and is often developed in much longer cycles than the SC release would suggest. For example different product teams have different strategies on how they use git branches, how and when to allow new dependencies, etc. It could very well be that release together effort will be discontinued in favor or smaller collections or something entirely different. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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?
dE . posted on Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:54:48 +0530 as excerpted: Those bugs are also reproducible on Debian. Does KsCD do anything for you at all? For starters... Hmm... That's one of the apps I decided I didn't need, when I was slimming down kde a few versions ago. With two burners (one got old and out of alignment and burnt coasters so I bought another, but the first still /played/ fine, so I kept it to play or for direct disc2disc copying), kscd could be set in kde settings to choose one or the other, but it always seemed to be the OTHER one when I went to actually /use/ the thing. And AFAIK, there wasn't a way to actually specify the device in kscd itself, so... Given that vlc plays CDs fine, and I run the phonon-vlc backend (no gstreamer installed here since IIRC the 0.8 era or some such, when it didn't work for what I needed, and given that there have always seemed to be alternatives it's an aweful heavy dep to test-install on gentoo where that means actually building the various bits, so while I'm reasonably sure whatever the problem was must have long since been fixed, I've just never needed it bad enough to bother, given that there /have/ always been other alternatives, and of course phonon-xine is long since deprecated and AFAIK removed from the gentoo tree entirely, so phonon-vlc it is, so vlc's a dep of kde here and not really optional), and there's various command-line utilities (cdda-player from libcdio being one of them) to play cds as well, I decided kscd wasn't worth the bother of continually building the updates (with all updates built from source, gentoo's excellent encouragement to that good security policy of only installing what you actually NEED, especially for something as big as kde, that's on a monthly or even biweekly (pre-releases) update schedule) and commented its entry in my copy of the kdemultimedia set that I keep synced with the gentoo/kde sets in the overlay, thus allowing it to be depcleaned. So any bugs with kscd I'd not see. The biggest 4.10 series bug for me, including from the betas, was the one that I think triggered the third pre-4.10.0 rc (based on git whatchanged comments in the gentoo/kde git repo) -- which AFAIK ultimately was a qt4 bug, but with a workaround (not fix) in kde 4.10.0 that gradually ate some resource or another, until kwin would start misbehaving, and eventually no further apps would start, CLI or X based, and I'd have to magic-srq the kernel to quit everything and remount-read-only all mounted partitions, since nothing not already running could start, including the normal shutdown sequence! If one quit and restarted kwin or kde itself, it would temporarily alleviate the problem, but even that failed to work after some time, so for awhile I was rebooting far too frequently for my liking! But once the issue was traced down to a qt4 bug and a patch devised for it, gentoo deployed qt4 updates, and could thus kill the work-around patch that they'd applied to kde 4.10.0. So while 4.10.0 was somewhat frustrating (tho I knew the problem based on reading the overlay's git whatchanged comments, so at least I knew it was being worked on with both kde and qt upstreams and with gentoo, among other distros), by 4.10.1 the issue was patched in gentoo's qt4 so the horrible kde workaround could be killed, and I'm not aware of any new-to-4.10 bugs remaining in 4.10.1 in the bits of kde I actually run these days. =:^) Of course there's still some of the long term bugs being worked on, with me CCed to several of them in kde's bugzilla so I know there has been activity, but I've not seen anything new, and the old bugs are long since worked around here, either by switching to something other than kde for that task, or by changing my own habits to work better with kde. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ 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 Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: On Friday, 2013-03-22, Duncan wrote: My problem isn't so much with that, it's with killing support for old versions before the new versions are sufficiently stable replacements, ESPECIALLY after promising support as long as there are users! That triggered a drop of a lot of my former kde software choices with the bump to kde4, when kde was insisting that kde4 was stable and that they weren't supporting kde3 any longer, at the very SAME time they were saying on bugs Oh, that's not ported to kde4 yet. Well, the 3 series was actively released about one and a half year into the 4 series and continues to be available up to today. To make certain older version become unavailable would be a lot of work, requiring to remove tags, branches and time information from the repositories. I consider it an inherent bonus of openly developed software that any version is available at any time. Whether certain products are update to newer APIs mostly depends on human resources associated with the product. Both as in availability (e.g. people switching to other areas, leaving the community, etc) and in decision making (e.g. joining efforts with a similar product's team, finding that newer technology has obsoleted a product, etc). While this does of course impact ongoing maintenance, e.g. shifting from product creators to product distributors or deployers, it does usually not impact ongoing availability. The latter usually not only in the form of markers in source code repositories but also in the form of archived release packages, etc. The story repeated with the akonadification of kdepim; I honestly DID try the akonadified kmail, but somewhere about the time it lost my 10th mail or so and I was trying to figure out whether it got caught in akonadi somewhere or was simply gone (after having to do much of the conversion manually in the first place because the automated process failed), I asked myself why I put up with it, why I couldn't just expect, AND HAVE, email that just worked, that devs didn't needlessly change something that was working perfectly fine as it was, breaking it in the process. (Ironically, I ended up on claws-mail, one of the short list of clients I had evaluated but eventually dropped for kmail, back when I originally switched from MS and OE. It's still using the same mh-dir mail format it was back in 2001... and it still works. Only unlike kmail, they didn't drop a well working solution in a chase for utopia. Had I only chosen it back then...) One of the things that can easily be missed when not considering the surroundings of the big picture is that requirements for products of the same or similar category can be vastly different. Akonadi is certainly a bit overengineered, also due to it being the second generation solution (second generation problem), but it does address needs and issues gathered over years of wide spread use. For example, if we look at KMail, one can easily fall into the trap of thinking of it as just an program for writing and reading emails and thus compare it too closely with other products that do that but only that. However, if one considers the additional requirements, it becomes often quickly obvious that other product's features for those requirements are either quite crude or not existant at all. Lets for example take the basic requirement of enabling other programs to send email, e.g. need for sending out invitations to events in scheduling and calendaring applications. While working on xdg-email it became often quite frustrating that email programs would either not have stable external interfaces (commandline, D-Bus or otherwise) or not even have them at all! Another, often quite problematic use case, is providing access to the addressbook or being able to access an externally provided one. A lot of programs fail to have accessors for external addressbooks, are only able to deal with their native one or are rather fragile regarding concurrent access (e.g. not having (proper) file locking or assuming in-memory state is equal to on-disk state, etc). Even for KMail, which had those requirments covered for quite some time already, some choices on how to do them had massiv impact on the agility of the product, its maintainablity and so on. The solution the involved developers devised deals with those requirements in an architecturally clean way. Unfortunately implementation of even the cleanest architecture and design can be difficult and appear to be complete and stable under test conditions because, e.g. some cases of data or configuration have just been hit yet. Due to the availability of alternatives, including previous versions of the same product, these growing pains can often be mitigated for certain groups of users, e.g. those not needing any advanced features or those who
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 2:47 PM, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati ren...@olgiati-in-paraguay.org wrote: On Sunday 24 Mar 2013 11:41 my mailbox was graced by a message from Kevin Krammer who wrote: For example, if we look at KMail, one can easily fall into the trap of thinking of it as just an program for writing and reading emails and thus compare it too closely with other products that do that but only that. However, if one considers the additional requirements, it becomes often quickly obvious that other product's features for those requirements are either quite crude or not existant at all. Thank $DEITY the other products do not, or they would be bloatware in the same way Kmail has become. For a test, install any distribution without KDE, then try to install Kmail, and see how many Mb you have to install Given that most users only need a simple email client, with attached addressbook, what about a Kmail-lite, that would be smaller, faster and simpler, for those users who do not feel the need to have a complete petrochemical works for preparing a cup of tea Cheers, Ron. It's perfectly OK to add new features, cause you should listen to everyone's advice and try to make everyone happy. Even if it's blotware, if things work OK for simple requirements (that's not the case with Kmail), then what's wrong? ___ 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 Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:28:37 +0530 dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: On the other hand, look at Xfce. They're hesitant to add basic features like Thunar search, tabbed browsing, cause they say the don't have enough developers. On top of that look at their super slow release cycles (-bugfixes). Thunar has tabs now. As a result there exists nothing more stable than Xfce. How about fvwm with an admin and universally friendly single text file, scrotwm or especially dwm which you configure in C before compiling a single binary. Of course they all take varying levels of effort before they can be released on your users. ___ 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?
Are you seriously calling it a failed release because of those minor buglets, some of which are either distro or configuration dependent? I consider that trolling. 4.10.1 is a rock solid release, and the work the devs have done during the past years is really is really paying off. On Wednesday 20 March 2013 19:17 dE . wrote: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316850 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316947 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316946 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316842 On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:59 PM, An Nguyen an.nguyen.f...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:58 PM, dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Any specific bugs? -- Med venlig hilsen / Best Regards Thomas Tanghus ___ 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?
dE . posted on Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:28:37 +0530 as excerpted: You can even look at Gnome. They test their major releases for full 6 months, and release a beta every month. Sort of like kde, if you consider the last bugfix release of a series the release. Actually, that's pretty much what some distros do -- they take the last release in a cycle (or penultimate, but incorporate most of the fixes from the last release in their own testing cycle), and add their own fixes on top of that. In a way it makes sense, since part of the whole 4.0 release argument was that it's just arbitrary numbers, and kde's users (primarily distros not end users, except for distros such as gentoo that expose the choice to the site admin as end user) pick the stability point at which they're comfortable in any case. Of course that didn't go over so well with 4.0, but the same general idea continues to exist and to work somewhat better with the series releases, with many distros running the last bugfix release (4.9.4 or 4.9.5, etc) of upstream's stable cycle, effectively making the earlier kde releases in the cycle (4.9.0 or 4.10.0, thru 4.9.3 or 4.10.3 at least) rcs, with kde's pre-releases then being betas (kde's rcs) and alphas (kde's betas). The point being, the user (generally the distro, except for distros that expose that choice to the end user, and of course those who build kde themselves) picks the point at which /they/ define it as stable enough, regardless of whether that's the first kde beta pre-release or the last stable series release or somewhere in the middle. Of course here, being the leading edge guy who's almost always running /something/ pre-release I am, particularly now that I moved off of kde for my seriously mission critical apps, I'm always looking forward to that first beta, raring to go! But of course I appreciate the fact that I can fall back to the then middle-of-the-stable-series previous feature version (4.x.3 or so, usually) if the kde beta release proves TOO beta for my needs. =:^) I actually did that with a couple packages in one of the stable series releases (4.6.2, IIRC) at one point, falling back to the previous version (4.6.1) and masking the later version, due to the problems in 4.6.2. (That was when I was still running konqueror as my primary browser, for one thing, and somebody committed something to the stable/bugfix series that should have gone only to the trunk/dev version, triggering konqueror's infamous double-submit issues it had at the time. That wasn't the worst of the problem, however. Everybody makes mistakes. The worst of the problem was that unlike a SERIOUS browser, even knowing the problem relatively quickly, it took TWO FURTHER BUGFIX releases, thus TWO MONTHS to get it fixed. This on a browser I was at the time using for Internet shopping, banking, and bill-pay, where a double-submit could in theory mean paying twice for whatever. That was when I realized, based on some dev comment or other, that even part (all?) of the kde/konqueror devs don't consider it more than a toy -- they use firefox or chrome/ chromium or whatever, for their SERIOUS browsing, bill-pay and the like. Of course this was on top of the lack of proper SSL certificate management in konqueror for several entire stable and ready for ordinary users feature series, in a time context when entire certificate authorities were getting blacklisted! Again, no big deal for a toy browser, a proof of concept demo not intended for serious use, bill-pay, banking, illegal dissident connections to out of country where the user's LIFE could depend on the integrity of the SSL connection, etc. Fortunately the latter didn't apply to me, but I was definitely using konqueror for internet shopping, bill-pay and banking! No more!) (But I had that bug contained rather early in its cycle, ultimately by switching to firefox as my primary browser, tho I still used it for more trivial browsing for a few releases, but it's not even installed now. The packages that I actually reverted for a time were plasma related. I even switched to the live version and git-bisected down to an individual commit for that bug, a panel that wouldn't stay where it belonged. Then I generated a patch reversing that commit and ran with it applied to the current release version, 4.6.2 IIRC, for a bit. Then a different user CCed on one of the related bug reports came up with a work-around, using kwin window rules to fix the panel in place, which didn't work for me exactly as he suggested, but that was the hint that let me create a slightly different window rule that DID work, and I reconfigured my panels a bit in the process as well, after which I could run the current package without a problem. But IIRC, the bug continued to appear for some users for the rest of the 4.6 cycle and into 4.7. Various bandaids were applied in the code thru 4.8 or 4.9 or so, when I think the
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
2013/3/28 dE . de.tec...@gmail.com: On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Leon Feng rainofch...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/3/23 Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org On Saturday, 2013-03-23, dE . wrote: Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report bugs before the very end user face them. I am not sure I understand this fully, isn't this what already happens? Due to the way of how distributions undergo their development cycles it effectively already increased the testing phase for software they contain. First each software is tested by the respective community's beta testers, then each software is tested even more widely by the distribution's beta phase and after that by its early upgraders. I would guess that at the point a normal user upgrades the software has been in testing for a couple of months, maybe even half a year. Lets have a look at the most recent version KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 tag was in November 2012 at which point it is most likely tested by KDE beta testers. This continues until February 2013 (about three months). If we take openSUSE as an example distribution, its respective release is March 2013, adding another monthof testing by people who build from source. The test audience at this point has expanded to include early upgraders of openSUSE. Not sure how long each update interval for openSUSE is but if we assume one month, then enthusiastic users who are not early upgraders will probably wait for the first of those, more cautious users even for the second or third. So depending where such users are comfort zone wise, the time between start of testing and deployment will be four and six months. KDE release time is not the time it hit all users. The testing time is very different based on distros. Usually Arch and [gentoo testing] is the first. They usually start using a upstream released version within days or even hours. Then Fedora, Ubuntu, Opensuse ... They usually have 6 months or 8 months release time and alpha\beta test. If their is cirtical bugs, they usually provide theri own patch. They provide seperate repo for advance users to upgrade immediately. Then Debian. [gentoo stable]. They usually do not release when there is still bugs exits. The time between Arch release and Debian release can be as long as 1-2 years. For debian stable users, the testing time is very long here. I checked gentoo's wiki here: [http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE] KDE 4.10 is still in testing, Gentoo has not releas it yet. So dE, are you using testing and complain KDE is not tested before release? 4.10 is keyworded, meaning it's lacking testing, but no major bugs have been found yet. I am glad that you know the fact that there are no major bugs found now to block the stable release. This's different from KDE release cycles, and the bugs I've complained about (except 1) are not Gentoo specific. If you think your bugs repoorted are major bugs. Contact gentoo KDE maintainer and keep it in testing until your major bugs are fixed. Besides I'm talking about general KDE stable releases. The KDE release see no major issue in KDE neither. So KDE4.10 is released as stable. And to make it clear: if you think there are any major bugs exist so KDE 4.10 should not be released as stable. Please give the bug number and talk with KDE release team. You can tell gentoo KDE maintainer not to mask KDE4.10 as stable if you think your bugs will hit normal gentoo users. As far as I see, no other distro can reproduce your bugs. Maybe it is distro specific. Or if you really really want stable and no bugs, use gentoo stable or Debian stable. You should stop using Gentoo testing. Feng Chao The sole reason why I'm using Gentoo testing is to test the new release. ___ 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. ___ 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?
dE . posted on Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:05:22 +0530 as excerpted: On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 5:10 PM, Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote: (As another gentooer...) Not really. No need for the live- unless you really want it, and that's not what Myriam was referring to. What Myriam was suggesting (I know because I saw the same testing-team invitation in the 4.10-pre-release announcements as well, with similar but a bit more detailed wording) was to run the kde pre-release betas and release-candidates and if desired, participate in the more organized pre-release testing program kde's doing now with them. Thanks for that info about the pre release ebuilds, but here, in the KDE overlay I've -- 4.10.49. But I was expecting 4.11. Regardless, I'll upgrade to it next time. 4.10.49. is current branch head. is live head. 4.11.49. won't be shipped until kde upstream branches it, which as I explained (tho with a caveat that while I run the betas I haven't been running live- branch so follow it a little less closely and may be slightly off on the specific timing) doesn't normally occur until about the time the rcs ship. Back with the 4.9 pre-releases anyway, which was when I last noted the specific branch timing (from the gentoo/kde overlay git whatchanged logs), I was actually a bit surprised that the branch didn't split until as late as it did -- they kept 4.9 as trunk head longer than I expected them too, considering I was already running the 4.9 betas (4.8.80 or whatever). I noted it at that point specifically due to a comment in one of the commits that the 4.9.49. branch was about to split off upstream, but kde hadn't done it yet. That (gentoo/kde overlay git) comment was in the context of some temporary change to the -live builds since the 4.9 branch hadn't split yet, that was going to need reverted once the split had occurred. As you can probably infer from the above, I track the gentoo/kde overlay git what-changed commit log religiously, every time I update. So I see anything that gets a commit or comment there. If the comment looks interesting and its on a core package, I'll git show that specific commit as well, to see what actually changed in the ebuild, what patches it now applies or no longer applies, etc. I do the same thing with the other two overlays I follow, mozilla and x11. And in the tree, I look specifically for -rX bumps, indicating a gentoo bump without a corresponding upstream version bump, and for many packages I'll run the changelog for that too, to see exactly why the gentoo package maintainers decided the -rX bump was necessary. Of course for critical packages like portage, (where zac keeps a much better changelog than the simple ebuild changelog most packages get, because portage is a gentoo project so it's basically an upstream changelog as well), I'll check the changelog every time, loading the mentioned bug numbers and sometimes the specific code changes linked from them to see what's actually changing, and why. And for openrc (and for pan, the news client I'm involved with upstream on), I wasn't happy with the level of detail in the normal gentoo changelogs, so I switched to the live-git- version, and have a script that runs git whatchanged on the local copy of upstream's git repo, as well. (I do something similar with the kernel too, but I have my own scripts handle it and don't use gentoo's kernel ebuilds at all. Also, the kernel's rate of change is high enough that especially pre-rc1 I don't routinely follow every git commit as I do with openrc and pan, but I often will for later in the cycle, especially if I've reported and am following a bug in that cycle as I did for the current linux-3.9 cycle.) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ 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, 2013-03-28, Duncan wrote: dE . posted on Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:53:39 +0530 as excerpted: Yes, that's the same base kde2 config now running kde4. Every once in awhile, especially after the 2.x to 3.x upgrade and later the 3.x to 4.x upgrade, a few months after the upgrade I go thru and check file times, moving files to a backup location if the mtimes haven't bumped since the update, to see if they get recreated and/or whether they're I lose any customizations. Major releases, (1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 4.x), use different config directories. While 2.x - 3.x was too long ago for me to remember, as shipped by kde, I am pretty sure it has always been the same base directory. There would simply be no gain in switching, but actually a lot of effort. 3.x and 4.x used the same config and data dirs, both system (share/config/ and share/apps/, usually with installation variables set so it's /usr/ share/config/ and /usr/share/apps/) and user ~/.kde/share/config/ and ~/.kde/share/apps, with the $KDEHOME location if unset defaulting to ~/.kde), except that kde4 added the freedesktop.org standard config and data dirs/vars for some things, but most existing apps still used the existing locations. Indeed. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Sunday, 2013-03-24, Kevin Chadwick wrote: On Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:41:35 +0100 Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: There were a couple of newly developed programs but they were almost always components of the workspace product. I am currently not aware of any application which dropped features during the porting, but I can obviously not know all applications and all their features. Multiple monitor support certainly fell behind for a while and I have to say that now xfce is catching up in terms of core features it certainly is making me wonder if that would have saved me time spent on resetup and increasing performance or dealing with compositing crashes even on fast systems when having many many windows open. I am talking about debian stable here too. But that is a workspace feature, no? I certainly think freedesktop.org should change it's name perhaps to enterprisedesktop.org or maybe cloudesktop.org I didn't get the context of that one. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Sunday, 2013-03-24, Kevin Chadwick wrote: On Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:16:34 + (UTC) Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote: Of course they'll with a near-certainty still continue to work on xorg for a few years anyway, but once the general desktop moves to wayland, the X dependency gets moved to the might not be installed for anything else list, and suddenly the additional deps cost of running that old app go ***WAY*** up, which means fewer people run them, which means a bigger likelihood of an accumulation of serious bugs over time. That's the wayland upset of the status quo I'm a bit worried about. OpenBSD is getting KMS drivers just now (except GPL'd drm drivers) so wayland should be possible for OpenBSD atleast on a fair chunk of hardware, as it is apparently very compatible with Linux, That is most likely only necessary if one uses the reference implementation. It would be weird if a protocol on user space level could somehow depend on certain kernel features. especially as I am skeptical of it being implemented well considering freedekstop.orgs history such as disregard for other opinions and anything non linux Hmm, can you point out a freedesktop.org spec which is bound to Linux? Qt and KDE implement most of them can run quite nicely on BSDs as far as I heard. Don't get me wrong I welcome the benefits of wayland which has been in development for so long and so hope that will mean it will be good for the whole eco system but I worry about recent stories of Gnome and KDE rushing towards it due to Mir. That seems illogical. Indeed. But that illogic is easily enought explained. Somebody misinterpreted developer communication. Happens all the time, one of the drawbacks of open development. Work has been going on for a long time already, on the Qt side of things (no idea about the GTK+ side) the respective QPA backend has developed in parallel with wayland's efforts for years, inspite of that requirng a lot of work in the end (having to update to protocol and API that were in flux). However that was deemed necessary so one could early one see if things needed to be different to fullfil the requirements of the toolkit side. However, some people seem to have got the impression that no such work was being done, so the discussions around that topic were emphasised more. Which, as we have seen, led unfortunately to the misinterpretation that work had only recently started. If you find anyone who got tricked by that misinterpretation, most likely because they didn't have access to respective developer communication themselves, you can easily show them a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLiSEmtRvGs It is from a developer on the Qt side of things, showing things that can be done with a Qt based wayland compositor. In November 2012, obviously way earlier than the recent Mir announcements and development for that compositor library did almost certainly start many months prior to the presentation. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Monday, 2013-03-25, Duncan wrote: Kevin Krammer posted on Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:41:35 +0100 as excerpted: And in fact that was what I guess kubuntu and some others were (rightly, it turned out) predicting, the reason they didn't do an LTS at the time, because they didn't believe the upstream support would actually be there. This was mostly a result of Canonical not actually doing any LTS work on anything other than their main product. Doing another Kubuntu LTS could have meant spending actual resources on maintenance and that is not something they were comfortable with. Naturally all actual LTS level distributors (SUSE, Red Hat, Debian) continued to do what their users and customers expected them to do and as usual shared the maintenance efforts between them. I think the main problem here is lumping together different highly independent products into one term. Thanks for continuing to emphasize that, Kevin. It's certainly going to be interesting to see how the kde frameworks 5 thing plays out, especially given that qt5 is going the much more modular route at exactly the same time, with most components of each becoming optional, only installed when a specific app needs them. Qt4 was already very modular, Qt5 mostly just changed which libraries are considered essential and which are not. A lot of modularity is discarded at packaging level, e.g. if a package is just libqt4 then an application package which would only needslibQtCore4 would still depend on all the other libraries. While Qt is fortunately mostly packages in a split way, KDE's libraries have traditionally not been. The Frameworks 5 efforts are a lot about making that more obvious, hopefully leading to a situation where there are separate packages for separate libraries. But there were a few feature drops as well. The biggest two projects I can name here aren't part of kde-core, but they're headline kde apps and thus very important: kaffeine, and amarok. AFAIK kaffeine for kde4 simply took too long to mature, and in the mean time, it simply didn't have the power features that people used it for in the kde3 era, instead of the many other media player alternatives out there. Features like frame-by-frame advance and incremental playback speed. These are advanced features that simply aren't available in the default level offerings, kde3 OR kde4, that had people using kaffeine for kde3 instead of the lower featured alternatives in the first place. Ah, didn't know about the change in Kaffein, never used it myself, I am an mplayer (console) user :) Which leaves amarok. Amarok's kde3 - kde4 conversion was for me a microcosm of the larger kde3 - kde4 debacle. The devs tried switching to mysql as akonadi was at the time, but in the process, they used mysql functionality (something about a mysql library for use in other apps, I've forgotten the details) that was completely broken on amd64/x86_64 at the time, because as all libraries on amd64, the library in question needed built with -fpic, but as that library was a part of the larger mysql package and building the rest of it with -fpic would have meant unacceptable slowdowns for the executables, nobody was actually building it with -fpic. This is strange, could that be a Gentoo artifact? MySQL is officially supporting in-process for some of its backends (usually MyISAM) and as far as I can tell worked well for most people I know (but those are all Debian users). It can be hard to tell from a developer perspective if something that is officially supported by an upstream dependency does not work under some circumstances and that some of your downstreams are triggern those. Btw, isn't there a continuation of the Amarok version 1 project? I think it is called Clementine or something like that. I do sort of wish gwenview would implement audio file support, however, and thus be a full media filemanager. Media files are my biggest use case for user-side/full-GUI file management, and gwenview handles images and video well enough that I use it almost exclusively for them, but it totally hides everything else, including audio-only files, which are now one of only two things I use dolphin for. The other is as a trivial-case file browser, basically a file open dialog on steroids. Interesting idea, have you checked if there is a wish item report for that? Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:21:47 +0100 Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: I certainly think freedesktop.org should change it's name perhaps to enterprisedesktop.org or maybe cloudesktop.org I didn't get the context of that one. Various projects have shown their disregard for the user base and preference for enterprise or cloud things like: Udisks - dropping support for 6 months for features people actually use in order to cater for sessions (it may be Arch using udisks2? before it should have done was the problem there however, Arch has some good but also terrible points) systemd - perhaps not a freedesktop.org spec? but it certainly abuses the freedesktop.org domain without allowing comments and has basically come from Red Hats want for spinning up VMs quickly, disregarding other priorities of the main user base. It doesn't suit the name freedesktop because it is forcing more and more dependencies such as polkit onto users when it could allow you to choose and change to whatever you want when you want like spacefm allows you to choose polkit/udisks, sudo/whatever with udevil etc.. especially as I am skeptical of it being implemented well considering freedekstop.orgs history such as disregard for other opinions and anything non linux Hmm, can you point out a freedesktop.org spec which is bound to Linux? Qt and KDE implement most of them can run quite nicely on BSDs as far as I heard. I guess I am meaning freedesktop hosted and my above gripe may actually be with the desktop environment dependencies that have nothing to do with freedesktop.org specs but happens to be common to varying degrees to all the DEs that use the specs. Perhaps you could confirm that for me? ___ 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?
Kevin Krammer posted on Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:54:28 +0100 as excerpted: Which leaves amarok. Amarok's kde3 - kde4 conversion was for me a microcosm of the larger kde3 - kde4 debacle. The devs tried switching to mysql as akonadi was at the time, but in the process, they used mysql functionality (something about a mysql library for use in other apps, I've forgotten the details) that was completely broken on amd64/x86_64 at the time, because as all libraries on amd64, the library in question needed built with -fpic, but as that library was a part of the larger mysql package and building the rest of it with -fpic would have meant unacceptable slowdowns for the executables, nobody was actually building it with -fpic. This is strange, could that be a Gentoo artifact? MySQL is officially supporting in-process for some of its backends (usually MyISAM) and as far as I can tell worked well for most people I know (but those are all Debian users). It wasn't a gentoo artifact, but due to gentoo being reasonably leading edge, gentoo (along with I suppose arch) was one of the first to hit it. At the time mysql was having growing pains of its own, and this was one of them. I wish I remember which library it was, but I believe it really hadn't been considered an external interface until just before this, and while amarok wasn't the first to use it, being as popular a kde app as it was, it was the first reasonably popular app to use it. And I guess previous use had all been 32-bit, so it really hadn't mattered. But the mysql build scripts weren't adding -fpic for that library's build yet, and the problem was so new people were figuring it all out in real time, so at first, the only alternative as to build the whole mysql package with -fpic on amd64. But of course that slowed down the (non-library) executables, and a big part of mysql's appeal as a database has always been performance, so all the big data customers would have immediately protested at the loss of that few percent in performance, and the distros were thus stuck for a period of a few months with a broken-for-amarok mysql. Meanwhile, amarok itself was behind kde4-core, and while kde4-core was busy telling users that kde3 was no longer supported, amarok and other kde non-core apps (at least k3b and kaffeine as well, that I was personally running at the time) had yet to release stable kde4 versions -- they had early alphas or betas out, but that was it. So users had to choose between an unsupported kde3 core but stable kde apps, or a so-called stable kde4-core (which was really still alpha with 4.2, beta with 4.3), but deal with unstable pre-release non-core apps. And I suppose the amarok devs thought it's only pre-release anyway, no big deal if amd64 users are shut out for a bit. Except that only kde4 was supported by kde-core by then, and I guess the amarok devs didn't consider the fact that they were locking out all their amd64 users that had already bitten the bullet (or in my case, were trying to bite it) and had switched to the only supported kde-core already. Meanwhile, gentoo was still sort of supporting kde3 at the time, for stable anyway, but they'd already announced it EOLed because upstream kde wasn't supporting it any longer, thus signaling users like me to get our butts in gear and move to kde4 while the moving was good. Except kde4 was still horribly broken, both core and even more the non-core apps. I expect amd64 archlinux users had a similar problem, because both gentoo and arch are rolling distros. Standard non-rolling distros in many cases were still kde3 with their current stable release, and were working thru these sorts of problems for either the immediately following release or the one after that, depending on where they were in their cycle at the time. That, or in a couple cases I guess the distros simply bit the bullet and switched to kde4 (exclusively) as well, since upstream had declared kde3 no longer supported, and what worked worked and what didn't didn't -- they were simply going with upstream. Anyway, there really should have been kde3 support until at least the popular non-core kde-based apps were stable on kde4. And as I've said, by (late) kde 4.5, pretty much everything (both kde core and non-core) was stabilized on kde4 that was going to be, so that's what /should/ have been 4.0 and would have been the minimum practical in ordered not to leave users in the gap. Tho even that's pushing it, as many users aren't ready to switch with a normal x.0 release either, and giving them a year to switch would have meant supporting kde3 thru kde 4.7 or so. But of course by then kdepim was going thru its betas, so it would have needed delayed further... until 4.9 or even the current 4.10. Either that or kdepim shouldn't have been allowed that major switch in the stable 4.x series, and should have waited until 5.x to drop kmail1, etc, tho of course the
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Leon Feng rainofch...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/3/23 Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org On Saturday, 2013-03-23, dE . wrote: Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report bugs before the very end user face them. I am not sure I understand this fully, isn't this what already happens? Due to the way of how distributions undergo their development cycles it effectively already increased the testing phase for software they contain. First each software is tested by the respective community's beta testers, then each software is tested even more widely by the distribution's beta phase and after that by its early upgraders. I would guess that at the point a normal user upgrades the software has been in testing for a couple of months, maybe even half a year. Lets have a look at the most recent version KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 tag was in November 2012 at which point it is most likely tested by KDE beta testers. This continues until February 2013 (about three months). If we take openSUSE as an example distribution, its respective release is March 2013, adding another monthof testing by people who build from source. The test audience at this point has expanded to include early upgraders of openSUSE. Not sure how long each update interval for openSUSE is but if we assume one month, then enthusiastic users who are not early upgraders will probably wait for the first of those, more cautious users even for the second or third. So depending where such users are comfort zone wise, the time between start of testing and deployment will be four and six months. KDE release time is not the time it hit all users. The testing time is very different based on distros. Usually Arch and [gentoo testing] is the first. They usually start using a upstream released version within days or even hours. Then Fedora, Ubuntu, Opensuse ... They usually have 6 months or 8 months release time and alpha\beta test. If their is cirtical bugs, they usually provide theri own patch. They provide seperate repo for advance users to upgrade immediately. Then Debian. [gentoo stable]. They usually do not release when there is still bugs exits. The time between Arch release and Debian release can be as long as 1-2 years. For debian stable users, the testing time is very long here. I checked gentoo's wiki here: [http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE] KDE 4.10 is still in testing, Gentoo has not releas it yet. So dE, are you using testing and complain KDE is not tested before release? 4.10 is keyworded, meaning it's lacking testing, but no major bugs have been found yet. This's different from KDE release cycles, and the bugs I've complained about (except 1) are not Gentoo specific. Besides I'm talking about general KDE stable releases. You can tell gentoo KDE maintainer not to mask KDE4.10 as stable if you think your bugs will hit normal gentoo users. As far as I see, no other distro can reproduce your bugs. Maybe it is distro specific. Or if you really really want stable and no bugs, use gentoo stable or Debian stable. You should stop using Gentoo testing. Feng Chao The sole reason why I'm using Gentoo testing is to test the new release. ___ 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 Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 10:42 PM, Anne Wilson cannewil...@googlemail.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 23/03/13 13:08, dE . wrote: There's very less time focused on testing; that should be increased, and there's really no reason to hurry releases, no one complained KDE is empty and featureless, but a lot complain about it's bugs and stability. This should point to something. Sorry:This discussion is getting a bit heavy, I'll take some time to respond. No distro forces you to use the latest of everything. Usually any version is supported for at least a few months after the release of a new one, so you can always stick with that. You claim to be happy to help test, yet you complain constantly. Let's try for some facts. I'm complaining right now, cause I see all this in the stable release (4.10.1). This makes early testing the releases more important, cause it reflects the state of KDE. Have you any idea how many different graphics cards are in use by the KDE community - i.e. by all users? Sound cards? and that's just the obvious ones. How is any developer going to test every one of those? It's simply not possible. Early adopters choose to be guinea pigs, helping testing. If you or anyone else doesn't want to be in that situation, simply stick with the older version. Thats's exactly why there should be more time to test RCs and the RC releases should be slow. Not everyone runs the same distro, or hardware, so KDE should be tested for maximum backends and libraries, which may revile new bugs; which as of the current time hits end users, and after that bugs are reported, which often lasts for years, cause devs are busy preparing for the next release. ___ 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?
2013/3/25 dE . de.tec...@gmail.com: On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: On Saturday, 2013-03-23, dE . wrote: Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report bugs before the very end user face them. I am not sure I understand this fully, isn't this what already happens? Due to the way of how distributions undergo their development cycles it effectively already increased the testing phase for software they contain. First each software is tested by the respective community's beta testers, then each software is tested even more widely by the distribution's beta phase and after that by its early upgraders. I would guess that at the point a normal user upgrades the software has been in testing for a couple of months, maybe even half a year. Lets have a look at the most recent version KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 tag was in November 2012 at which point it is most likely tested by KDE beta testers. This continues until February 2013 (about three months). If we take openSUSE as an example distribution, its respective release is March 2013, adding another monthof testing by people who build from source. The test audience at this point has expanded to include early upgraders of openSUSE. What about beta2? As stated before, the best way to find bugs is constant usability testing. Beta 1 and beta 2 have a few days in between releases, so what do you expect these testers to upgraded every day and yet use their system normally? Instead they attempt to just see if everything works externally, and upgrade to the next beta. The same happens with RC releases. These frequent releases cause confusion. By the time you find a bug for RC1, RC2 is already out, and the devs in the bugzilla will ask for you to upgrade. Who has that much of patience? Usually in KDE bugzilla, dev will ask result of new release to check whether it is already fixed. This will not mark the bug resolved. So the bug is till valid. If I am wrong for your case, give out the bug number so we can check. If you want constant usability testing, the target userbase should be somewhere between devs and end users; these people want a usable system, and don't mind testing. But for that to happen the releases should be slow, so it reaches them and it's convenient to them. Parden me? I do not see the logic here. You are requesting: 1. Do not release 2. RC version reach large user base. Are you suggesting distros release RC versions to normal users. I do not know any major distros regually release RC versions to stable repo. If you want large user base test, release it. That is the exactly reason behind Release early. The current schedule adds a lot of workload. Also real testing starts with RC after the freeze -- which ensures no new bugs. But unfortunately, there's not even a month between RC3 and the freeze -- how do you expect to find new bugs in a few weeks? Check http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.11_Release_Schedule and understand the schedule and commit policy before putting more miss understanding here. In short, there are Beta1, Beta2. Lots of Arch user do upgrade to when they hit [kde-unstable]. See: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=153419 The final (stable) release is hurried up for January; so what do you expect, a rock solid DE? Instead there should be 3 or 4 months between RCs, so bug can be collected and the RC releases reach across layers of users; it shouldn't happen that before the release reaches the user, it becomes outdated by 2 other releases. ___ 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. ___ 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?
Am Montag, 25. März 2013, 09:56:08 schrieb dE .: On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Ingo Malchow imalc...@kde.org wrote: Am Freitag, 22. März 2013, 13:15:07 schrieb Mirosław Zalewski: On 22/03/2013 at 12:34, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.org wrote: It is almost impossible, since the user can dramatically modify the original configuration and automating the process of wading through often illogical configuration files with triple definitions and contradictory instructions set by the user is a a lot of work I think there are two important things to note: (1) config files are created by KDE SC, not by users with text editors This is an assumption and hopefully no dev ever thinks the same way. Config files are text files and CAN be edited by anyone. And guess what, they are quite often edited by hand. You need to think in the big picture. What will your users do with what you provide? But nevertheless... No your's is an assumption and you're guessing. Off the millions of users, only devs have the patience and knowledge to edit those. Users edit them to workaround bugs. So they ... edit it. Did you want to proof my point? ... Ingo Malchow -- (neverendingo) KDE Community Working Group, KDE User Working Group KDE Community Forums Administrator New to KDE Software? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org or ask questions on http://forum.kde.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.orgwrote: Hi Nikos, On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 19/03/13 18:58, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. They've all been, in my case. Not serious crasher bugs, but glitches everywhere. Of the very annoying, hair-pulling sort. I did report all of them, but no one cares though. The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. They accumulate over time. There doesn't seem to be any stabilization going on with KDE. It's always a race to the next major version. Again, you are concluding from your experience to the general one. Please give me the bug reports so I can counter check. And make sure you ALWAYS test with a new user or move the old config files elsewhere when you do a major upgrade. Regards, myriam If everyone's concluding the same way, there's something wrong with your conclusions. Also it doesn't appear to be a to be a coincidence, that only KDE team members don't complain, and trying to defend the user's argument. The user is the only one speaking the real thing, and their opinion should be highest. Their argument should never be cut, instead more information should be asked. Why dont you KDE people realized, that there're computer users out there, who, after realizing the HUGE no. of bugs in one distro (using KDE as default), will switch to another one without complaining? They almost the whole of the KDE userbase. Even Linus quit cause of too many bugs, and you still don't believe it. Here, I'll give some e.gs -- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293766 This's a confirmed Debian bug; that commenter didn't know I confirmed it on Gentoo first, then reported it. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279569 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298916 Just look at this in general -- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?emailreporter1=1emailcc1=1list_id=561527bug_severity=criticalbug_severity=gravebug_severity=majorbug_severity=crashbug_severity=normalemailtype1=exactquery_format=advancedemail1=de.techno%40gmail.com ___ 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 2013-03-23 02:10 (GMT+0200) Nikos Chantziaras composed: The way things are, there's never gonna be a stable KDE version. Not in a billion years. You mean besides the one that already exists? KDE3 - TDE, not to mention openSUSE's KDE3, where the only work done is keeping it building and eradicating bugs, adding no new features. -- The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ ___ 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 Sun, 24 Mar 2013 11:44:17 +0530 dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.orgwrote: Hi Nikos, On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 19/03/13 18:58, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. They've all been, in my case. Not serious crasher bugs, but glitches everywhere. Of the very annoying, hair-pulling sort. I did report all of them, but no one cares though. The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. They accumulate over time. There doesn't seem to be any stabilization going on with KDE. It's always a race to the next major version. Again, you are concluding from your experience to the general one. Please give me the bug reports so I can counter check. And make sure you ALWAYS test with a new user or move the old config files elsewhere when you do a major upgrade. Regards, myriam If everyone's concluding the same way, there's something wrong with your conclusions. Also it doesn't appear to be a to be a coincidence, that only KDE team members don't complain, and trying to defend the user's argument. The user is the only one speaking the real thing, and their opinion should be highest. Their argument should never be cut, instead more information should be asked. Why dont you KDE people realized, that there're computer users out there, who, after realizing the HUGE no. of bugs in one distro (using KDE as default), will switch to another one without complaining? They almost the whole of the KDE userbase. Even Linus quit cause of too many bugs, and you still don't believe it. Here, I'll give some e.gs -- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293766 This's a confirmed Debian bug; that commenter didn't know I confirmed it on Gentoo first, then reported it. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279569 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298916 Just look at this in general -- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?emailreporter1=1emailcc1=1list_id=561527bug_severity=criticalbug_severity=gravebug_severity=majorbug_severity=crashbug_severity=normalemailtype1=exactquery_format=advancedemail1=de.techno%40gmail.com I got to chip in here having followed this thread since it's inception . I run Arch Linux one of the earliest of the early adopters of KDE releases. I have found no bugs yet worth creating all this fuss and fluff over unless you are getting petty about Kmail ect and the easy fix there is simply do what most people have done switch to claws mail . It would rather suggest you are doing something strange that no one else seems to want or need in which case and rightly so you are on your own .. Pete . -- Linux 7-of-9 3.8.4-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Mar 20 22:10:25 CET 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux ___ 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 Friday, 2013-03-22, Duncan wrote: My problem isn't so much with that, it's with killing support for old versions before the new versions are sufficiently stable replacements, ESPECIALLY after promising support as long as there are users! That triggered a drop of a lot of my former kde software choices with the bump to kde4, when kde was insisting that kde4 was stable and that they weren't supporting kde3 any longer, at the very SAME time they were saying on bugs Oh, that's not ported to kde4 yet. Well, the 3 series was actively released about one and a half year into the 4 series and continues to be available up to today. To make certain older version become unavailable would be a lot of work, requiring to remove tags, branches and time information from the repositories. I consider it an inherent bonus of openly developed software that any version is available at any time. Whether certain products are update to newer APIs mostly depends on human resources associated with the product. Both as in availability (e.g. people switching to other areas, leaving the community, etc) and in decision making (e.g. joining efforts with a similar product's team, finding that newer technology has obsoleted a product, etc). While this does of course impact ongoing maintenance, e.g. shifting from product creators to product distributors or deployers, it does usually not impact ongoing availability. The latter usually not only in the form of markers in source code repositories but also in the form of archived release packages, etc. The story repeated with the akonadification of kdepim; I honestly DID try the akonadified kmail, but somewhere about the time it lost my 10th mail or so and I was trying to figure out whether it got caught in akonadi somewhere or was simply gone (after having to do much of the conversion manually in the first place because the automated process failed), I asked myself why I put up with it, why I couldn't just expect, AND HAVE, email that just worked, that devs didn't needlessly change something that was working perfectly fine as it was, breaking it in the process. (Ironically, I ended up on claws-mail, one of the short list of clients I had evaluated but eventually dropped for kmail, back when I originally switched from MS and OE. It's still using the same mh-dir mail format it was back in 2001... and it still works. Only unlike kmail, they didn't drop a well working solution in a chase for utopia. Had I only chosen it back then...) One of the things that can easily be missed when not considering the surroundings of the big picture is that requirements for products of the same or similar category can be vastly different. Akonadi is certainly a bit overengineered, also due to it being the second generation solution (second generation problem), but it does address needs and issues gathered over years of wide spread use. For example, if we look at KMail, one can easily fall into the trap of thinking of it as just an program for writing and reading emails and thus compare it too closely with other products that do that but only that. However, if one considers the additional requirements, it becomes often quickly obvious that other product's features for those requirements are either quite crude or not existant at all. Lets for example take the basic requirement of enabling other programs to send email, e.g. need for sending out invitations to events in scheduling and calendaring applications. While working on xdg-email it became often quite frustrating that email programs would either not have stable external interfaces (commandline, D-Bus or otherwise) or not even have them at all! Another, often quite problematic use case, is providing access to the addressbook or being able to access an externally provided one. A lot of programs fail to have accessors for external addressbooks, are only able to deal with their native one or are rather fragile regarding concurrent access (e.g. not having (proper) file locking or assuming in-memory state is equal to on-disk state, etc). Even for KMail, which had those requirments covered for quite some time already, some choices on how to do them had massiv impact on the agility of the product, its maintainablity and so on. The solution the involved developers devised deals with those requirements in an architecturally clean way. Unfortunately implementation of even the cleanest architecture and design can be difficult and appear to be complete and stable under test conditions because, e.g. some cases of data or configuration have just been hit yet. Due to the availability of alternatives, including previous versions of the same product, these growing pains can often be mitigated for certain groups of users, e.g. those not needing any advanced features or those who can live with the quirks of previous versions. Fortunately, kde5 aka kde frameworks is supposed to be a much less
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Sunday 24 Mar 2013 06:17 my mailbox was graced by a message from dE . who wrote: It is almost impossible, since the user can dramatically modify the original configuration and automating the process of wading through often illogical configuration files with triple definitions and contradictory instructions set by the user is a a lot of work. Wiping them is not an option as the user would loose configurations. That is the downside of a highly customisable desktop environment, and that possibility of customisation is one of the main reasons most user actually choose KDE over other desktops. There's no project in in the world which expects users to clean configs manually before installation, except for an overhaul releases; where in most cases a different config directory is chose. It would be a help if KDE did not store in hidden configuration files (.kde4) a mort of stuff that is in fact user data, like all the Kmail messages, Konqueror bookmarks, etc. When it becomes possible to zap the actual config files without loosing one's data, then it will be acceptabel to do each time a clean install of KDE. Until then, I am continuing my migration to LXDE... (only remains ro transform the Kmail stuff into Claws) Cheers, Ron. -- When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. -- Oscar Wilde -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org -- ___ 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 Sunday 24 Mar 2013 11:41 my mailbox was graced by a message from Kevin Krammer who wrote: For example, if we look at KMail, one can easily fall into the trap of thinking of it as just an program for writing and reading emails and thus compare it too closely with other products that do that but only that. However, if one considers the additional requirements, it becomes often quickly obvious that other product's features for those requirements are either quite crude or not existant at all. Thank $DEITY the other products do not, or they would be bloatware in the same way Kmail has become. For a test, install any distribution without KDE, then try to install Kmail, and see how many Mb you have to install Given that most users only need a simple email client, with attached addressbook, what about a Kmail-lite, that would be smaller, faster and simpler, for those users who do not feel the need to have a complete petrochemical works for preparing a cup of tea Cheers, Ron. -- When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. -- Oscar Wilde -- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org -- ___ 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?
2013/3/24 dE . de.tec...@gmail.com: On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.org wrote: Hi Nikos, On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 19/03/13 18:58, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. They've all been, in my case. Not serious crasher bugs, but glitches everywhere. Of the very annoying, hair-pulling sort. I did report all of them, but no one cares though. The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. They accumulate over time. There doesn't seem to be any stabilization going on with KDE. It's always a race to the next major version. Again, you are concluding from your experience to the general one. Please give me the bug reports so I can counter check. And make sure you ALWAYS test with a new user or move the old config files elsewhere when you do a major upgrade. Regards, myriam If everyone's concluding the same way, there's something wrong with your conclusions. Also it doesn't appear to be a to be a coincidence, that only KDE team members don't complain, and trying to defend the user's argument. The user is the only one speaking the real thing, and their opinion should be highest. Their argument should never be cut, instead more information should be asked. Why dont you KDE people realized, that there're computer users out there, who, after realizing the HUGE no. of bugs in one distro (using KDE as default), will switch to another one without complaining? They almost the whole of the KDE userbase. This user vs your KDE (dev) people seperation make me feel really bad. There is actually just a KDE community in which users build their own system. Most of contributors are just normal KDE users who devote their free time to make KDE better without any pay. So when they do have free time, they will use it to fix the bug which is the most annoyance to themself. This is the characteristics of open source projects without a company backing it. So if you want to have a bug fixed, the fastest way is by fixing it yourself. If you do not have time or skill, provide enough information and show people the bug is important. Convince they to spend their free time to fix it. Blame the whole KDE community is not the way out. Feng Chao Even Linus quit cause of too many bugs, and you still don't believe it. Here, I'll give some e.gs -- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293766 This's a confirmed Debian bug; that commenter didn't know I confirmed it on Gentoo first, then reported it. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279569 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298916 Just look at this in general -- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?emailreporter1=1emailcc1=1list_id=561527bug_severity=criticalbug_severity=gravebug_severity=majorbug_severity=crashbug_severity=normalemailtype1=exactquery_format=advancedemail1=de.techno%40gmail.com ___ 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. ___ 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 Sunday, 2013-03-24, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote: On Sunday 24 Mar 2013 11:41 my mailbox was graced by a message from Kevin Krammer who wrote: For example, if we look at KMail, one can easily fall into the trap of thinking of it as just an program for writing and reading emails and thus compare it too closely with other products that do that but only that. However, if one considers the additional requirements, it becomes often quickly obvious that other product's features for those requirements are either quite crude or not existant at all. Thank $DEITY the other products do not, or they would be bloatware in the same way Kmail has become. Well, it is not bloatware, it contains features required for certain use cases. One of the reasons there are many different products for similar tasks is that not all users have the same tasks and can thus use applications more tailored to their specific use case. From the point of view of people working with console tools any software with graphical interface could be called bloatware, while other users would find it an absolute necessity. Especially Free Software allows a lot of sharing underlying technology, making it very viable to have different products for different needs. Given that most users only need a simple email client, with attached addressbook, what about a Kmail-lite, that would be smaller, faster and simpler, for those users who do not feel the need to have a complete petrochemical works for preparing a cup of tea Sure, anyone if free to do that, all libraries used by KMail proper are Free Software and can be used independent of the program they were originally created for. However, there seem to be quite some programs out there that fill that use case already, so it might not be best possible choice for investing time :) Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 2013-03-24 13:30 (GMT+0100) Kevin Krammer composed: Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote: It would be a help if KDE did not store in hidden configuration files (.kde4) a mort of stuff that is in fact user data, like all the Kmail messages, Konqueror bookmarks, etc. Actually .kde/ :) Actually it depends on whether you use it in a distro that supplanted KDE3 with (alphaware) KDE 4.0 (e.g. Fedora, as with Grub Legacy supplanted by Grub2; and Mandriva), or added KDE4 as an additional installation choice (e.g. openSUSE 12.3 released this month offering both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.10, also as with Grub Legacy and Grub2; and Mageia 3's offer of both Grub Legacy and Grub2, having learned a huge lesson from KDE3-KDE4). 3 4 can't both use .kde/ (cf. /boot/grub plus /boot/grub2 vs. only /boot/grub) in the same $HOME without causing big trouble. -- The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ ___ 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?
Kevin Krammer posted on Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:41:03 +0100 as excerpted: On Friday, 2013-03-22, Duncan wrote: My problem isn't so much with that, it's with killing support for old versions before the new versions are sufficiently stable replacements, ESPECIALLY after promising support as long as there are users! Well, the 3 series was actively released about one and a half year into the 4 series and continues to be available up to today. For the record, this asegio post was the one I was referring to re the promise to support kde3 as long as there were users. http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html A lot of folks including me took that as the promise it was, from someone in a position to make it, given his status at the time as president of the KDE foundation or whatever it/he was. KDE's reneging on that very publicly made promise lost them the trust of a LOT of users and admins who were depending on KDE to keep its word. And if it was NOT correct and he spoke without the authority to do so, where's the disavowal? And if he didn't mean supported by kde itself, he could have said that. Otherwise a statement such as KDE3 will remain supported for years. Why? Because there are users. ... from someone in the position he was in, directly implies that kde itself will be providing that support. Yes, the Trinity folks stepped up, but there was no way to ensure they would, and indeed, kde3 users were left without reasonable support for quite some time before trinity got on its feet and was viable enough to do that support. Of course that came on top of the hard fact that despite kde's insistence to the contrary, kde 4.3 was still alpha quality, not even beta. I routinely run pre-release and know both the experience and definitions of alpha: critical features still missing, and beta: features generally implemented but sometimes broken, and with kde devs at the time of kde 4.3 still replying to bugs saying features weren't implemented in kde4 yet, that's classic alpha. Yet they were insisting this alpha quality software was ready for ordinary use, and worse, had dropped support for the actually stable version where it was actually working. Worse yet, this was after that public promise NOT to drop said support! By the same measure, however, I'm on record as saying that with late kde 4.5 (say 4.5.4), kde4 was finally release quality. What was 4.5.0 thus should have been a late rc, and 4.5.4 or 4.5.5 were what should have been 4.0. KDE did finally deliver with 4.5, as I always expected it would, but the process was far more difficult than it should have been for all involved, users and devs alike, due to broken promises and prematurely forcing people to a still broken and immature platform. Yes, absolutely release early, release often, just PLEASE don't call a pre-release ready for ordinary use so you can dump support for the version that actually works that you promised to provide! Actually, that's why I jumped off of akonadified kmail so fast. I saw the whole early kde4 thing happening all over again. Only this time I knew there were alternatives and I make the personal executive decision to take one of them! Had the whole kde4.5 presented as full-quality- release thing not happened, I'd have had a lot more tolerance for problems as kmail worked thru them, but as the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, and I wasn't down with a repeat of THAT story! One of the things that can easily be missed when not considering the surroundings of the big picture is that requirements for products of the same or similar category can be vastly different. Akonadi is certainly a bit overengineered, also due to it being the second generation solution (second generation problem), but it does address needs and issues gathered over years of wide spread use. For example, if we look at KMail, one can easily fall into the trap of thinking of it as just an program for writing and reading emails and thus compare it too closely with other products that do that but only that. Believe it or not I understand that. As I said, I'd have likely been rather more tolerant as the kdepim/kmail/akonadi devs worked thru the bugs, had the whole pre-4.5 kde4 thing not gone down as it did. But... Also... as happened to me earlier with amarok, I realized that the feature set the devs were focused on simply wasn't the feature set I needed. Among other things, I /needed/ mail that WORKED RELIABLY, without losing messages. I had and have little doubt kmail would/will eventually get back to that, and perhaps it already has. But that doesn't change the facts on the ground, and I'd seen the whole story about so-called supported old versions while the kinks were worked out in the new versions play out before, with kde3... Meanwhile, all these fancy new features they were working on were nice... but not what I actually needed,
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Sunday, 2013-03-24, Duncan wrote: Kevin Krammer posted on Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:41:03 +0100 as excerpted: On Friday, 2013-03-22, Duncan wrote: My problem isn't so much with that, it's with killing support for old versions before the new versions are sufficiently stable replacements, ESPECIALLY after promising support as long as there are users! Well, the 3 series was actively released about one and a half year into the 4 series and continues to be available up to today. For the record, this asegio post was the one I was referring to re the promise to support kde3 as long as there were users. http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html A lot of folks including me took that as the promise it was, from someone in a position to make it, given his status at the time as president of the KDE foundation or whatever it/he was. KDE's reneging on that very publicly made promise lost them the trust of a LOT of users and admins who were depending on KDE to keep its word. Well, KDE e.V. has no say of what contributors of KDE do, it was specifically designed that way to falling into the trap of steering by committee. No individual in a community of peers can make promises on behalf of other indivuals, unless the first individual happens to be the employer of the second or has some other form of contract. I would interpret such a statement as an assumption based on expectations of that time, e.g. that users would have switched to the new stack as some point or moved to products provided by other vendors. providing that support. Yes, the Trinity folks stepped up, but there was no way to ensure they would, and indeed, kde3 users were left without reasonable support for quite some time before trinity got on its feet and was viable enough to do that support. I think there are other entities that provide support and maintenance for software version that do not undergo any active development by the source community anymore. Not necessarily KDE software but I think there are even some which do that, i.e. I think SUSE and Red Hat do. For some products such entities will even do active development, backporting and maintaining features added only to newer versions by the source. Of course that came on top of the hard fact that despite kde's insistence to the contrary, kde 4.3 was still alpha quality, not even beta. I routinely run pre-release and know both the experience and definitions of alpha: critical features still missing, and beta: features generally implemented but sometimes broken, and with kde devs at the time of kde 4.3 still replying to bugs saying features weren't implemented in kde4 yet, that's classic alpha. I think the main problem here is lumping together different highly independent products into one term. Most applications and libraries have been straight ports to Qt4, a lot even using Qt3 support classes and removing that dependency over many cycles. There were a couple of newly developed programs but they were almost always components of the workspace product. I am currently not aware of any application which dropped features during the porting, but I can obviously not know all applications and all their features. The closest thing I can come up with is a change in feature set in Konqueror's file manager personality due to also using the engine developed for Dolphin. Given the alternative of not having the file manager personality anymore it was probably still the right choice. However, doing most of my file management on the shell makes me a bad judge on that matter. Actually, that's why I jumped off of akonadified kmail so fast. I saw the whole early kde4 thing happening all over again. Only this time I knew there were alternatives and I make the personal executive decision to take one of them! Had the whole kde4.5 presented as full-quality- release thing not happened, I'd have had a lot more tolerance for problems as kmail worked thru them, but as the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, and I wasn't down with a repeat of THAT story! Yes, one of the things that needs to be and hopefully will be addressed by the split on the next version transition is the invisibility of project boundaries. There is often very little or sometimes even no overlap at all between the groups of people working on certain products. This distinction of different topci groups is often assumed and understood for non-coding related contributions, e.g. translators for language A not being involved in anyway with translations of language B other than potentially collaborating on improving source strings or working on common tools and procedures. For some unknown reason this does not seem to be the case for the code contributors, i.e. people assuming that a set of contributors to one product somehow having influence or even control about any work going on for a different product. It is probably
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:16:34 + (UTC) Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote: Of course they'll with a near-certainty still continue to work on xorg for a few years anyway, but once the general desktop moves to wayland, the X dependency gets moved to the might not be installed for anything else list, and suddenly the additional deps cost of running that old app go ***WAY*** up, which means fewer people run them, which means a bigger likelihood of an accumulation of serious bugs over time. That's the wayland upset of the status quo I'm a bit worried about. OpenBSD is getting KMS drivers just now (except GPL'd drm drivers) so wayland should be possible for OpenBSD atleast on a fair chunk of hardware, as it is apparently very compatible with Linux, however the input side is going to be a big issue and so Ubuntu choosing Mir to give it control of the input for mobile without having to discuss changes may with a bit of luck create a healthier design and actually be beneficial for all the BSD's too. Perhaps it will lead to a more more modular nature (Do one thing and do it well, not simple to apply to X but still stands). I've read a little and don't know much about Wayland but see some of the benefits, but I do know that I am happy with X and time will show the drawbacks. Therefore personally as a user, I'd like to see OpenBSD's priviledge seperation patches merged into Linux X11 more than wayland especially as I am skeptical of it being implemented well considering freedekstop.orgs history such as disregard for other opinions and anything non linux and even removing features 99% of users use in udisks for features 1% of users use(enterprises/RedHat users). Don't get me wrong I welcome the benefits of wayland which has been in development for so long and so hope that will mean it will be good for the whole eco system but I worry about recent stories of Gnome and KDE rushing towards it due to Mir. That seems illogical. To me it indicates that Wayland may be more encompassing than it should be and I really hope it doesn't turn into a systemd that so many have wasted time on. ___ 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 Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:41:35 +0100 Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: There were a couple of newly developed programs but they were almost always components of the workspace product. I am currently not aware of any application which dropped features during the porting, but I can obviously not know all applications and all their features. Multiple monitor support certainly fell behind for a while and I have to say that now xfce is catching up in terms of core features it certainly is making me wonder if that would have saved me time spent on resetup and increasing performance or dealing with compositing crashes even on fast systems when having many many windows open. I am talking about debian stable here too. Whilst loving some new features I have certainly longed for 3.5 at times and so I can certainly understand the original ops position with xfce being more competitive these days. KDE was way ahead for me with 3 and I liked 4 but now I'm in two minds though would never touch Gnome3. For systems I really care about my ideal is leaning towards fvwm for lock downable central configuration file and many core features I believe still lacking in KDE (like mouse at screen edge desktop transition), with xfce parts as it is so modular. Xfce is also more cross platform or atleast easier to port. I know OpenBSD porters have had difficulty despite huge efforts. Quite ironic considering QT itself is so portable. The closest thing I can come up with is a change in feature set in Konqueror's file manager personality due to also using the engine developed for Dolphin. Given the alternative of not having the file manager personality anymore it was probably still the right choice. I now use Konqueror despite being an advocate of having a dedicated file manager before it happened. I switched back when I recently found I had to create actions for a full featured find which was under tools and in order to use fully functional bookmarks, such as to files with the added bonus of having the filesizeview plugin handy. I would likely use konqueror everywhere if it wasn't for the dependencies, atleast until spacefm gains fully functional bookmarks as it is standalone and doesn't make choices like you should use polkit.. or recompile... end of discussion which didn't start. (You know you can have a kde user using a sudoers Default:kde timestamp_timeout=0 if that is the lowest security level that you want). I certainly think freedesktop.org should change it's name perhaps to enterprisedesktop.org or maybe cloudesktop.org p.s. It is more important to ignore enthusiastic dismissiveness than constructive criticism. ___ 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?
Kevin Krammer posted on Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:41:35 +0100 as excerpted: On Sunday, 2013-03-24, Duncan wrote: Kevin Krammer posted on Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:41:03 +0100 as excerpted: Well, the 3 series was actively released about one and a half year into the 4 series and continues to be available up to today. http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html A lot of folks including me took that as the promise it was[.] KDE's reneging on that very publicly made promise lost them the trust of a LOT of users and admins who were depending on KDE to keep its word. Well, KDE e.V. has no say of what contributors of KDE do, it was specifically designed that way to falling into the trap of steering by committee. No individual in a community of peers can make promises on behalf of other indivuals, unless the first individual happens to be the employer of the second or has some other form of contract. I did say that I'm aware of the difficulty of steering volunteers, who after all can simply take their donated time and donate it elsewhere. And in fact that was what I guess kubuntu and some others were (rightly, it turned out) predicting, the reason they didn't do an LTS at the time, because they didn't believe the upstream support would actually be there. In fact, I believe the above linked post was in part a direct reply and counter to such concerns. How then could-it/did-it so overreach, without equally public disavowal, if indeed it was a promise he had no standing to make, so apparently directly addressing the concerns of the community that there WOULDN'T be such support, promising there would be, from someone apparently in a position to make that promise? I would interpret such a statement as an assumption based on expectations of that time, e.g. that users would have switched to the new stack as some point or moved to products provided by other vendors. I guess so. But a lot of users including me were looking for answers at the time, and took that as the answer they were looking for. Live and learn, I guess. FWIW, that would appear to be why the gnome3 alternatives sprang up so quickly when it jumped the shark as well -- they too had learned from the kde3 - kde4 debacle, and how trinity stepped up, but too late to actually make a difference for many. So the community appears to have learned its painful lesson from both kde and gnome, and come away older and wiser for it. It's a much different place now, and I don't think it could happen again -- the community would step in a lot faster this time, as it did with the gnome3 alternatives when they tried it, and at a rather smaller scale, as I personally did with my switch to claws-mail from kmail when it tried it. I think the main problem here is lumping together different highly independent products into one term. Thanks for continuing to emphasize that, Kevin. It's certainly going to be interesting to see how the kde frameworks 5 thing plays out, especially given that qt5 is going the much more modular route at exactly the same time, with most components of each becoming optional, only installed when a specific app needs them. It sounds real good and I'm definitely looking forward to it, but there's both the challenge of actually getting there, and probably some not yet fully perceived down sides as well. But it'll definitely be interesting, and I really AM looking forward to it, at this point anyway believing it'll be a dramatic improvement on what we have at present. There were a couple of newly developed programs but they were almost always components of the workspace product. I am currently not aware of any application which dropped features during the porting, but I can obviously not know all applications and all their features. For the most part it wasn't so much dropping features, as in way too visible and important cases, dropping the SINGLE feature, reliability, that everybody wants and uses, while ADDING features that were nice enough, but added bloat and weren't particularly useful without the core reliability that got dropped somewhere amongst all those changes. But there were a few feature drops as well. The biggest two projects I can name here aren't part of kde-core, but they're headline kde apps and thus very important: kaffeine, and amarok. AFAIK kaffeine for kde4 simply took too long to mature, and in the mean time, it simply didn't have the power features that people used it for in the kde3 era, instead of the many other media player alternatives out there. Features like frame-by-frame advance and incremental playback speed. These are advanced features that simply aren't available in the default level offerings, kde3 OR kde4, that had people using kaffeine for kde3 instead of the lower featured alternatives in the first place. I /think/ it actually got there by now, but I don't know, as I long since moved on to smplayer (and am now running
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Ingo Malchow imalc...@kde.org wrote: Am Freitag, 22. März 2013, 13:15:07 schrieb Mirosław Zalewski: On 22/03/2013 at 12:34, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.org wrote: It is almost impossible, since the user can dramatically modify the original configuration and automating the process of wading through often illogical configuration files with triple definitions and contradictory instructions set by the user is a a lot of work I think there are two important things to note: (1) config files are created by KDE SC, not by users with text editors This is an assumption and hopefully no dev ever thinks the same way. Config files are text files and CAN be edited by anyone. And guess what, they are quite often edited by hand. You need to think in the big picture. What will your users do with what you provide? But nevertheless... No your's is an assumption and you're guessing. Off the millions of users, only devs have the patience and knowledge to edit those. Users edit them to workaround bugs. ___ 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 Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: On Saturday, 2013-03-23, dE . wrote: Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report bugs before the very end user face them. I am not sure I understand this fully, isn't this what already happens? Due to the way of how distributions undergo their development cycles it effectively already increased the testing phase for software they contain. First each software is tested by the respective community's beta testers, then each software is tested even more widely by the distribution's beta phase and after that by its early upgraders. I would guess that at the point a normal user upgrades the software has been in testing for a couple of months, maybe even half a year. Lets have a look at the most recent version KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 tag was in November 2012 at which point it is most likely tested by KDE beta testers. This continues until February 2013 (about three months). If we take openSUSE as an example distribution, its respective release is March 2013, adding another monthof testing by people who build from source. The test audience at this point has expanded to include early upgraders of openSUSE. What about beta2? As stated before, the best way to find bugs is constant usability testing. Beta 1 and beta 2 have a few days in between releases, so what do you expect these testers to upgraded every day and yet use their system normally? Instead they attempt to just see if everything works externally, and upgrade to the next beta. The same happens with RC releases. These frequent releases cause confusion. By the time you find a bug for RC1, RC2 is already out, and the devs in the bugzilla will ask for you to upgrade. Who has that much of patience? If you want constant usability testing, the target userbase should be somewhere between devs and end users; these people want a usable system, and don't mind testing. But for that to happen the releases should be slow, so it reaches them and it's convenient to them. The current schedule adds a lot of workload. Also real testing starts with RC after the freeze -- which ensures no new bugs. But unfortunately, there's not even a month between RC3 and the freeze -- how do you expect to find new bugs in a few weeks? The final (stable) release is hurried up for January; so what do you expect, a rock solid DE? Instead there should be 3 or 4 months between RCs, so bug can be collected and the RC releases reach across layers of users; it shouldn't happen that before the release reaches the user, it becomes outdated by 2 other releases. ___ 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 Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 9:09 PM, Kevin Krammer kram...@kde.org wrote: On Thursday, 2013-03-21, dE . wrote: I'd the same issue with Debian testing; also distros wont upgrade to the latest 'stable' KDE; they usually wait for the last bug fix release, or Make sense, doesn't it? The x.y.0 version is always the start of a stabilization cycle, just like for the distributions themselves. It is like a slider from newest to stablest, depending on ones needs one needs to chose the right point in time. E.g. on my Kubuntu workstation I upgrade a couple of days before a new release comes up, thus getting the most stable version availale. On my Debian laptop I run Debian/Unstable, so I can't do that on distribution versions, but I can still wait for certain projects x.y.1 or x.y.2 before upgrading the respective packages. Servers with Debian/Stable are also not upgraded on release, admins test on separate machines until a minor release appears which meets their criteria. As far as I know that is even true for admins of Windows servers, i.e. they always wait for at least the first service pack before they consider deployment. I guess one could say that there are two cascades cycles: - development cycle: x.y - x.y+1 - ... - refinement/deployment cycle: x.y.z - x.y.z+1 The development cycle goes from basic features to advanced features, the deployment cycle from unstable to stable. Or like a matrix with basic/unstable in one corner, advanced/unstable in one direction, basic/stable in the other and advanced/stable in the opposite corner. Obviously both dimensions expanding over time :) Cheers, Kevin Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report bugs before the very end user face them. And look -- Xfce and cdrtools do that. And a no. of bugs and regressions have been ironed in the alpha release itself. ___ 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 Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.orgwrote: Hi all, On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:17 PM, dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Ingo Malchow imalc...@kde.org wrote: Am Dienstag, 19. März 2013, 22:28:48 schrieb dE .: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Can't complain here, I use KDE since 4.2, and so far 4.10.1 runs rock stable, using Kubuntu 13.04 beta1 I personally, don't really mind the bugs, it reminds me how ignorant KDE release team is; Calling people who work as volunteers and do contribute to KDE on a daily basis ignorants is a bit harsh, don't you think? So far I haven't seen you contribute to the release team and help making it better. ... I'm asking the devs to work less and in a relaxed manner, and they've problems with that. Everyone benefits that way. Bugs get fixed, devs are less pressured on. I'ld have absolutely not complained if this was not the 'stable' release, but this's what KDE team calls stable and that's unacceptable. There ain't many bug related complaints about Xfce -- it's a lot more stable. I personally hardly found any bugs while using it. Comparing apples with oranges, Xfce has only a fraction of the software that is shipped with a KDE SC release. ... Another reason why KDE should have longer release cycle, and another reason for the no. of bugs. Xfce being smaller, has longer releases, they wait for years between major release, just testing it; KDE on the other hand, being many times heavy has shorter release cycles. This mail is for sake of the project, not for MY personal frustrations with KDE. I deploy Xfce anyway. ... It pretty much sounds like frustrations. You take your own unstable system for a global issue. Believe me, it is not. Neither do i say, as my system is highly stable every other system is as well. As you said you do report bugs, which is highly appreciated. But like with all bugs, they need to be reproducable, else they are hard to fix. The more useful information the better. Yep, I went through the bug reports you listed and can't reproduce any of those, so maybe something is specific to your installation. Did you try removing the configuration files from the previous installation? It might just be cruft lying around causing this, and since configuration files are very individual it is very hard to preserve those without any glitches from time to time. KDE upgrade don't remove them to avoid people loosing their setups, but sometimes it is just a good idea to move those old files out of the way and try with a default configuration You know, that's practically not possible. No one's gonna do it. Instead the DE components should checked for this since the bulk of KDE users upgrade. ... You're basically trying to say here, I shouldn't complaint; and this's exactly why the project is in such a horrible state. The reason why I'm complaining is cause I want the situation to improve -- so does everyone else. Nobody said that, it is just that you are complaining in a very unprofessional way, by shouting and calling people ignorants, and judging your installation to be the only reference. Please do test with a new user to make sure it is not just your setup that has a problem before generalizing problems you see to be KDE's fault. Because if you want to give lessons on how to make it better, please do start doing that yourself :) I do that always, unless I misinterpreted the cause of the bug. The moment you open upgraded the KDE desktop you see bugs. Not here, on the contrary, KDE has become more stable and polished with every release. How about joining the testing team and help with testing before the release instead of just calling people names afterwards? If you want Free Software to get better you can contribute yourself, but please do it in a more constructive way. I'm running on Gentoo, and I've to build the release for the purpose, which almost never works, and then reverting back becomes very difficult. However I'm using the 'unstable' versions of KDE (relative to Gentoo, according to which 4.9.5 is sable). This's solely for the purpose of reporting bugs; but they almost never get fixed by the final stable release. The best way to test is constant usability testing cause bugs never come up when you're searching for them; they come up when you seriously use it for your real tasks. Regards, Myriam PS. And BTW, you might have seen that we all sing with our names, how about signing your mails? Or is this on purpose to do anonymous ramblings? I am not going to call you what Slashdot would, though. I prefer to remain anon. And I go by this name only. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives:
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:45 AM, Anne Wilson an...@kde.org wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 21/03/13 15:22, dE . wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Sérgio Basto ser...@serjux.com mailto:ser...@serjux.com wrote: On Ter, 2013-03-19 at 22:28 +0530, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Fedora 18 push it , and so far no bugs found . There's a bug in that pager application, and a Fedora 18 user acknowledged it the day after I filed it. They rather report this upstream cause this's a KDE problem. I never report Gentoo bugs on these KDE issues. KDE is at best untested. Bugs are right in front of you standing on the desktops, and no developer or tester sees it until a bug has been filed and a lot users complaint. This time, the pager and notification widgets have bugs and both of them exist on the default desktop, yet no one noticed. Major bugs persists for years on end with no solution in sight. It's not enough to report a bug. To get anything done you have to show exactly how to reproduce it, and this is often neglected. I've seen bug reports with a Needs Info ticket stay like that for years. The author of the bug gets an email asking for email, but for some reason never responds. It's disheartening. You are often told that many developers are volunteers and lack time, but the real truth is that they never developed their mind-reading skills :-) Anne I always do that, unless I realize the bug is hard to reproduce, and wont affect many people. My attempt to report bugs is to take the bullet before the very end user does. ___ 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 Saturday, 2013-03-23, dE . wrote: Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report bugs before the very end user face them. I am not sure I understand this fully, isn't this what already happens? Due to the way of how distributions undergo their development cycles it effectively already increased the testing phase for software they contain. First each software is tested by the respective community's beta testers, then each software is tested even more widely by the distribution's beta phase and after that by its early upgraders. I would guess that at the point a normal user upgrades the software has been in testing for a couple of months, maybe even half a year. Lets have a look at the most recent version KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 tag was in November 2012 at which point it is most likely tested by KDE beta testers. This continues until February 2013 (about three months). If we take openSUSE as an example distribution, its respective release is March 2013, adding another monthof testing by people who build from source. The test audience at this point has expanded to include early upgraders of openSUSE. Not sure how long each update interval for openSUSE is but if we assume one month, then enthusiastic users who are not early upgraders will probably wait for the first of those, more cautious users even for the second or third. So depending where such users are comfort zone wise, the time between start of testing and deployment will be four and six months. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 10:56 PM, Sérgio Basto ser...@serjux.com wrote: On Qui, 2013-03-21 at 20:52 +0530, dE . wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Sérgio Basto ser...@serjux.com wrote: On Ter, 2013-03-19 at 22:28 +0530, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Fedora 18 push it , and so far no bugs found . There's a bug in that pager application, and a Fedora 18 user acknowledged it the day after I filed it. They rather report this upstream cause this's a KDE problem. I never report Gentoo bugs on these KDE issues. KDE is at best untested. Bugs are right in front of you standing on the desktops, and no developer or tester sees it until a bug has been filed and a lot users complaint. This time, the pager and notification widgets have bugs and both of them exist on the default desktop, yet no one noticed. What is the pager bug ? I have a pager very small , so doesn't affect me . About notifications , when over notification it will appears close bottom . Anything else ? You need to enable it in pager settingsDisplay icons. ___ 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 19/03/13 18:58, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. They've all been, in my case. Not serious crasher bugs, but glitches everywhere. Of the very annoying, hair-pulling sort. I did report all of them, but no one cares though. The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. They accumulate over time. There doesn't seem to be any stabilization going on with KDE. It's always a race to the next major version. ___ 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?
Hi Nikos, On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 19/03/13 18:58, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. They've all been, in my case. Not serious crasher bugs, but glitches everywhere. Of the very annoying, hair-pulling sort. I did report all of them, but no one cares though. The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. They accumulate over time. There doesn't seem to be any stabilization going on with KDE. It's always a race to the next major version. Again, you are concluding from your experience to the general one. Please give me the bug reports so I can counter check. And make sure you ALWAYS test with a new user or move the old config files elsewhere when you do a major upgrade. Regards, myriam -- Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) ___ 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 Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. On 22/03/2013 at 11:38, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.org wrote: And make sure you ALWAYS test with a new user or move the old config files elsewhere when you do a major upgrade. Myriam, this is exactly Nikos point. Old config files laying around causes various issues with KDE SC. By encouraging him to triage bugs on fresh config, you admit that. I think that this is huge drawback of KDE SC. As user, I am forced to recreate my carefully crafted configuration from scratch with each major update. Do I remember what exactly did I change and where? No, I have better things to do. Starting from fresh config, I only discover that something I am used to does not work. Then I go into System settings and try to find relevant option. Recreating configuration is not matter of two or three hours; it's matter of days during which my work is not effective, because I am constantly disturbed with changes I have to make. Or I can save myself some hustle and start from fresh config, but copy some old files over. But this way I am forced to dive into KDE SC internals and understand purpose of each file (to be able to judge whether I should copy it or not). Do I want to? No, I have other things to do. Honestly, why can't KDE SC support seamless update from previous major release? Is it too much work to rewrite config files whose format has changed? -- Best regards Mirosław Zalewski ___ 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?
Hi Miroslav, On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Mirosław Zalewski mini...@poczta.onet.pl wrote: On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: The biggest issue is that with each new release, there's more glitches while the old ones are still there. On 22/03/2013 at 11:38, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.org wrote: And make sure you ALWAYS test with a new user or move the old config files elsewhere when you do a major upgrade. Myriam, this is exactly Nikos point. Old config files laying around causes various issues with KDE SC. By encouraging him to triage bugs on fresh config, you admit that. I think that this is huge drawback of KDE SC. As user, I am forced to recreate my carefully crafted configuration from scratch with each major update. Do I remember what exactly did I change and where? No, I have better things to do. Starting from fresh config, I only discover that something I am used to does not work. Then I go into System settings and try to find relevant option. Recreating configuration is not matter of two or three hours; it's matter of days during which my work is not effective, because I am constantly disturbed with changes I have to make. Or I can save myself some hustle and start from fresh config, but copy some old files over. But this way I am forced to dive into KDE SC internals and understand purpose of each file (to be able to judge whether I should copy it or not). Do I want to? No, I have other things to do. Honestly, why can't KDE SC support seamless update from previous major release? Is it too much work to rewrite config files whose format has changed? It is almost impossible, since the user can dramatically modify the original configuration and automating the process of wading through often illogical configuration files with triple definitions and contradictory instructions set by the user is a a lot of work. Wiping them is not an option as the user would loose configurations. That is the downside of a highly customisable desktop environment, and that possibility of customisation is one of the main reasons most user actually choose KDE over other desktops. Regards, Myriam -- Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) ___ 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?
Am Freitag, 22. März 2013, 13:15:07 schrieb Mirosław Zalewski: On 22/03/2013 at 12:34, Myriam Schweingruber myr...@kde.org wrote: It is almost impossible, since the user can dramatically modify the original configuration and automating the process of wading through often illogical configuration files with triple definitions and contradictory instructions set by the user is a a lot of work I think there are two important things to note: (1) config files are created by KDE SC, not by users with text editors This is an assumption and hopefully no dev ever thinks the same way. Config files are text files and CAN be edited by anyone. And guess what, they are quite often edited by hand. You need to think in the big picture. What will your users do with what you provide? But nevertheless... (2) these config files are already read and understood by current KDE SC releases. If they contain illogical on contradictory instructions, it's KDE SC configuration GUI who put it there. So, maybe configuration GUI should be fixed to ensure that config files are unambiguous? Sorry, but I do not believe that it's impossible to read and understand config file that were read and understood correctly by previous version of software. It is obviously matter of developers priorities. The priority is and should be fixing bugs, like told 3 times up in this thread. Things might fail but you need to be made aware of it. The use cases are simply too many to consider each and every one. As an example, the ordering of config file entries, typos in there, outdated entries, wrong ones,... the list goes on. So, it boils down to users who test and report such issues. That's what beta releases and the testing team is for. Ingo Malchow -- (neverendingo) KDE Community Working Group, KDE User Working Group KDE Community Forums Administrator New to KDE Software? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org or ask questions on http://forum.kde.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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 22/03/2013 at 13:28, Ingo Malchow imalc...@kde.org wrote: This is an assumption and hopefully no dev ever thinks the same way. Config files are text files and CAN be edited by anyone. And guess what, they are quite often edited by hand. You need to think in the big picture. Yes, I have made an assumption that *using* KDE SC without thinking much about software internals and hand-crafting config files is supported use-case. As I understand, it is not; non-compatibility with previous major release is not considered bug. I stand corrected. It is clear to me now, that I have tried to make KDE SC something it was never intended to be. I just want to get my (unrelated to KDE SC) work done in environment that corresponds with my needs and habits. With regret I say that I am not your target user. Sorry I have bothered you. -- Best regards Mirosław Zalewski ___ 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?
Am Freitag, 22. März 2013, 14:46:10 schrieb Mirosław Zalewski: On 22/03/2013 at 13:28, Ingo Malchow imalc...@kde.org wrote: This is an assumption and hopefully no dev ever thinks the same way. Config files are text files and CAN be edited by anyone. And guess what, they are quite often edited by hand. You need to think in the big picture. Yes, I have made an assumption that *using* KDE SC without thinking much about software internals and hand-crafting config files is supported use-case. As I understand, it is not; non-compatibility with previous major release is not considered bug. I stand corrected. It is clear to me now, that I have tried to make KDE SC something it was never intended to be. That is awaiting any proof. Just now i have seen resistance to either reading what was written or understanding it. One last time, it IS a bug and should be nailed down and reported. See the other dozen mails about it. I just want to get my (unrelated to KDE SC) work done in environment that corresponds with my needs and habits. With regret I say that I am not your target user. Obviously you are quite correct. And i am sorry for any dev that needs to deal with users who resist any suggestion or hint... Honestly, you jumped on a thread stating the obvious (it is a bug), skipping answers and yet replying with FUD(As I understand, it is not; non- compatibility with previous major release is not considered bug). Hardly the way to go. Sorry I have bothered you. Ingo Malchow -- (neverendingo) KDE Community Working Group, KDE User Working Group KDE Community Forums Administrator New to KDE Software? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org or ask questions on http://forum.kde.org signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ 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?
Kevin Krammer posted on Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:53:01 +0100 as excerpted: Honestly, why can't KDE SC support seamless update from previous major release? Is it too much work to rewrite config files whose format has changed? This is of course intended to happen, KDE software has had configuration and data modification tools for ages. My personal setup has been with me for over a decade now, rarely prompting me to reconfigure things. FWIW, that's true here as well. I've been running the same kde config, with /home copied over to new hardware (which on my workstation unlike my netbook, I upgrade a piece at a time so there's never a new computer, just a changed out drive, or max-change, a changed out cpu/mobo/memory/gpu all at the same time, as all the buses and formats had changed so to upgrade one I had to upgrade them all, but then it's the old hard drive installed in the new machine) as appropriate, since kde 2.x in late 2001, when I switched from MS to Linux. Yes, that's the same base kde2 config now running kde4. Every once in awhile, especially after the 2.x to 3.x upgrade and later the 3.x to 4.x upgrade, a few months after the upgrade I go thru and check file times, moving files to a backup location if the mtimes haven't bumped since the update, to see if they get recreated and/or whether they're I lose any customizations. And yes, there's specific files (the infamous plasma-desktop-appletsrc being one of them) that I keep extra backups of and usually backup before any major changes, as I've learned the hard way how difficult it can be to find and edit out the bad bits on the more complex files if something does go wrong. And yes, when I hit a problem, I know how to use the bisect method to narrow it down to a single config file if I have to (tho after doing it a few times and figuring out the way kde organizes its config, I found I could often pick the problem file purely by name, or at minimum, reduce it to a handful of files right away, so the bisect is now often only 3ish rounds max), and am used to doing just that, in kde config files or using git to bisect a kernel bug, either way. But it really is possible to use the same basic config that long, even with heavy customizing, and I'm a case in point. My problem isn't so much with that, it's with killing support for old versions before the new versions are sufficiently stable replacements, ESPECIALLY after promising support as long as there are users! That triggered a drop of a lot of my former kde software choices with the bump to kde4, when kde was insisting that kde4 was stable and that they weren't supporting kde3 any longer, at the very SAME time they were saying on bugs Oh, that's not ported to kde4 yet. The story repeated with the akonadification of kdepim; I honestly DID try the akonadified kmail, but somewhere about the time it lost my 10th mail or so and I was trying to figure out whether it got caught in akonadi somewhere or was simply gone (after having to do much of the conversion manually in the first place because the automated process failed), I asked myself why I put up with it, why I couldn't just expect, AND HAVE, email that just worked, that devs didn't needlessly change something that was working perfectly fine as it was, breaking it in the process. (Ironically, I ended up on claws-mail, one of the short list of clients I had evaluated but eventually dropped for kmail, back when I originally switched from MS and OE. It's still using the same mh-dir mail format it was back in 2001... and it still works. Only unlike kmail, they didn't drop a well working solution in a chase for utopia. Had I only chosen it back then...) But, as I said earlier in the thread, that means I'm now running only the core kde desktop, with nearly all of my mission critical apps now non- kde and to the extent possible, with semantic-desktop not just disabled at run-time, but without support for it even built at all. Which means I don't have to worry about a broken kde killing my mail (for instance) any more. Which means I'm now much freeer to run and /enjoy/ running the kde pre-releases. =:^) And it also means if kde pulls the kde4 stunt again, since it's only the core kde desktop and a few games I'm running now, it'll be MUCH easier to drop it entirely, if I have to. Fortunately, kde5 aka kde frameworks is supposed to be a much less disruptive upgrade, and it's going much more modular as well, so it's much less likely. But THIS time I'm prepared, should it happen. I won't be caught not viably being able to switch, again. Which is even more proof that kde's not going to drop the ball that way again, because I'm actually prepared for it now, so of course it's not going to happen. =;^] Of course there's the possible upcoming xorg - wayland switch to worry about too. That could really upset the Linux desktop environment status quo in all sorts of interesting ways and I
Re: [kde] Yet another failed KDE release?
Hi all, On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:17 PM, dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Ingo Malchow imalc...@kde.org wrote: Am Dienstag, 19. März 2013, 22:28:48 schrieb dE .: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Can't complain here, I use KDE since 4.2, and so far 4.10.1 runs rock stable, using Kubuntu 13.04 beta1 I personally, don't really mind the bugs, it reminds me how ignorant KDE release team is; Calling people who work as volunteers and do contribute to KDE on a daily basis ignorants is a bit harsh, don't you think? So far I haven't seen you contribute to the release team and help making it better. ... There ain't many bug related complaints about Xfce -- it's a lot more stable. I personally hardly found any bugs while using it. Comparing apples with oranges, Xfce has only a fraction of the software that is shipped with a KDE SC release. ... This mail is for sake of the project, not for MY personal frustrations with KDE. I deploy Xfce anyway. ... It pretty much sounds like frustrations. You take your own unstable system for a global issue. Believe me, it is not. Neither do i say, as my system is highly stable every other system is as well. As you said you do report bugs, which is highly appreciated. But like with all bugs, they need to be reproducable, else they are hard to fix. The more useful information the better. Yep, I went through the bug reports you listed and can't reproduce any of those, so maybe something is specific to your installation. Did you try removing the configuration files from the previous installation? It might just be cruft lying around causing this, and since configuration files are very individual it is very hard to preserve those without any glitches from time to time. KDE upgrade don't remove them to avoid people loosing their setups, but sometimes it is just a good idea to move those old files out of the way and try with a default configuration ... You're basically trying to say here, I shouldn't complaint; and this's exactly why the project is in such a horrible state. The reason why I'm complaining is cause I want the situation to improve -- so does everyone else. Nobody said that, it is just that you are complaining in a very unprofessional way, by shouting and calling people ignorants, and judging your installation to be the only reference. Please do test with a new user to make sure it is not just your setup that has a problem before generalizing problems you see to be KDE's fault. Because if you want to give lessons on how to make it better, please do start doing that yourself :) The moment you open upgraded the KDE desktop you see bugs. Not here, on the contrary, KDE has become more stable and polished with every release. How about joining the testing team and help with testing before the release instead of just calling people names afterwards? If you want Free Software to get better you can contribute yourself, but please do it in a more constructive way. Regards, Myriam PS. And BTW, you might have seen that we all sing with our names, how about signing your mails? Or is this on purpose to do anonymous ramblings? I am not going to call you what Slashdot would, though. -- Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) ___ 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 Qui, 2013-03-21 at 20:52 +0530, dE . wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Sérgio Basto ser...@serjux.com wrote: On Ter, 2013-03-19 at 22:28 +0530, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Fedora 18 push it , and so far no bugs found . There's a bug in that pager application, and a Fedora 18 user acknowledged it the day after I filed it. They rather report this upstream cause this's a KDE problem. I never report Gentoo bugs on these KDE issues. KDE is at best untested. Bugs are right in front of you standing on the desktops, and no developer or tester sees it until a bug has been filed and a lot users complaint. This time, the pager and notification widgets have bugs and both of them exist on the default desktop, yet no one noticed. What is the pager bug ? I have a pager very small , so doesn't affect me . About notifications , when over notification it will appears close bottom . Anything else ? -- Sérgio M. B. ___ 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?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 21/03/13 15:22, dE . wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Sérgio Basto ser...@serjux.com mailto:ser...@serjux.com wrote: On Ter, 2013-03-19 at 22:28 +0530, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Fedora 18 push it , and so far no bugs found . There's a bug in that pager application, and a Fedora 18 user acknowledged it the day after I filed it. They rather report this upstream cause this's a KDE problem. I never report Gentoo bugs on these KDE issues. KDE is at best untested. Bugs are right in front of you standing on the desktops, and no developer or tester sees it until a bug has been filed and a lot users complaint. This time, the pager and notification widgets have bugs and both of them exist on the default desktop, yet no one noticed. Major bugs persists for years on end with no solution in sight. It's not enough to report a bug. To get anything done you have to show exactly how to reproduce it, and this is often neglected. I've seen bug reports with a Needs Info ticket stay like that for years. The author of the bug gets an email asking for email, but for some reason never responds. It's disheartening. You are often told that many developers are volunteers and lack time, but the real truth is that they never developed their mind-reading skills :-) Anne -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlFLXE0ACgkQj93fyh4cnBdbpQCeL7dm3hv7hyMeMg33dUYQ+ouj P08AmgIvQznbFoL9VncOgN9nOy39GXRZ =O+QN -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ 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?
One of these appears to be a udisk problem. On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:59 PM, An Nguyen an.nguyen.f...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:58 PM, dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Any specific bugs? Just out of my curiosity. An. ___ 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. ___ 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?
Gentoo with -semantic-desktop here. On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote: dE . posted on Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:28:48 +0530 as excerpted: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. I switched to KDE when it was at 4.4. That's strange. Seems quite stable for me. But then again, I'm on gentoo and building with USE=-semantic-desktop, one of the original big bullet items for kde4, and have migrated off of anything kdepim related since kmail akonadified and destabilized, and off of konqueror when it became clear that even its devs apparently consider it no more than a toy, certainly not something worth the security attention necessary for online banking and the like (see my earlier posts on that). So after all that's gone, for kde I'm mostly using the base desktop, kwin, plasma, and the infrastructure to support them, and while plasma in particular was HORRIBLE in early kde4 (even after the kde folks were insisting it was ready for ordinary users in 4.3, that was alpha, 4.4 was beta, late 4.5 finally stabilized reasonably such that 4.5.4 or so was what SHOULD have been released as 4.0), they're all reasonably stable now, and have been since 4.5 (with a blip in early 4.6). Altho plasma does sometimes eat its config for breakfast, a terrible thing if you're a heavy customizer as I am. But I know the files to restore from backup when necessary... Oh, I install and play several of the kde games, too. But it's somewhat ironic that while late in the kde3 era I was trying to find a way to get rid of the last couple gtk2 apps I ran, these days nearly all my mission critical stuff is gtk2: I always ran pan as a news (nntp) client and it was in fact one of the last gtk2 apps I was trying to get rid of in the late kde3 era, and then and now I start it with kde and it's seldom not running as long as I'm in X, but I switched from kmail and akregator to claws-mail (two separate instances start with kde, one for mail, one for feeds), and I run firefox now as my browser of choice. Those are the most important here and they're now all gtk2 based. Media apps: smplayer2 and vlc are qt4 based as is minitube, for video. I run mpd with various switchable frontends (including mpc CLI and qtmpc in X), replacing the jumped-the-shark amarak. Even my CD burner, which was kde-based k3b, is now... it's gtk2 based but actually I have to look... graveman, because k3b had a nasty dep on udisks, which wouldn't have been bad except for what IT pulled in (parted for udisks2, lvm2 for udisks1, both not something I want/need enough to be willing to continually build updates from source, as gentoo does. So now, my main dep on kde is just the core desktop environment itself, and that has been reasonably stable, even running the kde prereleases, which I can do now without too much fear, since I don't have to worry about pre-release kmail eating mail, or pre-release konqueror crashing when I need to epay a bill. So again ironically, I'm freeer now to run the kde pre-releases than I was back when I was running more of kde than just the core desktop and a few games! So... while I started out disagreeing with you, I guess in the end, it may be that we're not talking about the same overall kde, since some parts of it kde4 or later development (cough, the kmail/akonadi fiasco) ruined to the point I migrated off of them, so I don't really know much about how the wider kde is doing, these days, only the core, which really has been quite stable for me, as I said since kde 4.5, with a blip in 4.6. Anyway, these days I really am quite upbeat about the core kde I actually still run, with anything akonadi/kdepim/semantic-desktop configured out and no longer allowed anywhere close to my systems. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman ___ 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. ___ 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 Ter, 2013-03-19 at 22:28 +0530, dE . wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Fedora 18 push it , and so far no bugs found . -- Sérgio M. B. ___ 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 Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:58 PM, dE . de.tec...@gmail.com wrote: This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Any specific bugs? Just out of my curiosity. An. ___ 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?
Le 19 mars à 17:58 dE . a écrit This release of KDE (4.10.1), is till date the buggiest I've seen. Please give some specific bug references. Did you ever report any of your bugs ? Please be more specific, or desist ! -- Vincent-Xavier JUMEL GPG Id: 0x2E14CE70 http://thetys-retz.net Rejoignez les 4870 adhérents de l'April http://www.april.org/adherer Parinux, logiciel libre à Paris : http://www.parinux.org ___ 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?
This mailing list is full of rants and complains and the KDE teams doesnt give a damn. +1 When I have gotten through, though I'm not sure this list actually works 100% of the time. Does it use greylisting or moderation? I sent a mail helping someone and it didn't get through. On the subject. 'First time to use KDE' -- ___ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) ___ ___ 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.
