OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 21st Jan 2008 18:22 UTC

Ars reviews KDE 4.0.0: "KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series." They were also at the KDE 4.0 release event.

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RE[9]: Comments Unfair

by borker on Tue 22nd Jan 2008 20:04 UTC in reply to "RE[8]: Comments Unfair"

Member since:
2006-04-04

Observations. I've made observations.

for example?

You still have not provided a credible answer for why a very buggy codebase with large areas of missing functionality needs to "go gold" before it can be developed against.

I have. And then the following example you provide:

I do development using the SVN branch of Django all the time. The API is not completely frozen, but the developers are *very* responsible even with respect to the SVN. API changes are minimal, and very well documented.

which, if you are honestly offering this up as a comparison, indicates you're not really qualified to even try and make the 'observations' that others may find 'uncomfortable' (bah). KDE is one of the biggest FOSS code bases around. A web framework like Django doesn't even have an ABI to worry about protecting for a multi-year development cycle. And wow, how do they manage to control the API of such a monster? I'm not trying to run their work down, but I do web based development for a day job, I've written more than one framework myself and believe me its a task light years apart from what the KDE guys have achieved.

But if the developers of an API take a more cavalier approach, I can understand that you might have trouble with their SVN branch. Considering what the KDE guys apparently consider "gold release" standards, I can imagine that their SVN would be a nightmare. But there is no reason that *has* to be. And certainly no reason that reasonably stable betas and Developer Previews could not be released.

at this point our conversation is getting repetitive and unless you demonstrate some deeper understanding of the realities of large scale software development then I don't think we have a lot left to say to each other on this topic. Take my withdrawal however you like...

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