'No Good Would Have Come From Delaying the Release'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 14th Jan 2008 14:41 UTC, submitted by superstoned
KDE "I think it's really necessary to respond to some criticism seen on the reactions to the latest OSnews article. I won't go into the article itself, imho it's rather negative, but hey. From an user's perspective, it makes sense to only review 3 or 4 parts of KDE 4 and complain about them, and ignore all the other brilliant pieces of work in there, right? On to the responses, I found this reaction by dagw to be the most typical. Well. That's painful. So, is he right? Did we make the wrong decision? Let's look at it from a broader perspective for a while. Let's see it in the Grand Scheme of Things to Come."
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RE: Comment by Thom_Holwerda
by superstoned on Mon 14th Jan 2008 14:54 UTC in reply to "Comment by Thom_Holwerda"
superstoned
Member since:
2005-07-07

""No good would have come of delaying the release any longer. We would just have delayed progression. Would you want that?"


That's all well and good Jos, but neither dawg, nor I said the release ought to have been delayed.

We just said it should have been named a Developer Release or something to that effect. That's got nothing to do with delaying anything - it has to do with naming something according to what it actually is, and this could have prevented a whole lot of negative responses. "

renaming it to 'developer release' or something wouldn't have made much of a difference. Distro's would not have picked it up, or they would have - in the first case, the release would simply be another beta, and in the second case, ppl would complain anyway. And it wouldn't do much about the point about the parts of KDE which were ready, nor about the community dynamics.

We've communicated the state of KDE clearly, and the fact it's a .0.0 release should be signaling it's status anyway.

""I won't go into the article itself, imho it's rather negative, but hey."

Re-read the article. It wasn't negative at all - try to tally up the negative versus the positive bits, and you'll see. The fact that everyone focused on the negative bits probably says more about the state of KDE 4.0.0 than it does about me. "
It wasn't all negative, for sure - maybe it was also the many comments and other articles out there that made me feel that way. But I did miss things like Parley and the many other great things in 4.0.0, really.

Reply Parent Score: 10

Thom_Holwerda Member since:
2005-06-29

It wasn't all negative, for sure - maybe it was also the many comments and other articles out there that made me feel that way. But I did miss things like Parley and the many other great things in 4.0.0, really.


That's why I called it a "quick few impressions" and not a proper review ;) - I am saving the proper review for 4.1.

Reply Parent Score: 1

superstoned Member since:
2005-07-07

hehe, ok, looking forward to that one, then.

Reply Parent Score: 4

RE[2]: Comment by Thom_Holwerda
by rockmen1 on Mon 14th Jan 2008 16:03 in reply to "RE: Comment by Thom_Holwerda"
rockmen1 Member since:
2006-02-04

"renaming it to 'developer release' or something wouldn't have made much of a difference. Distro's would not have picked it up, or they would have - in the first case, the release would simply be another beta, and in the second case, ppl would complain anyway. "

If it is DR lease, few people are going to use/test it, that make the KDE 4.0 get to mature slower.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[2]: Comment by Thom_Holwerda
by Joe User on Mon 14th Jan 2008 17:06 in reply to "RE: Comment by Thom_Holwerda"
Joe User Member since:
2005-06-29

"Many users will start using KDE 4.0.0 and start reporting bugs, so many corner issues the developers themselves would've NEVER found will be fixed in 4.1"

Ah, come on... All the visual issues have been reported many times to the KDE mailing lists, to blogs, and even here in the OSN comments.

"No good would have come of delaying the release any longer"

I read the whole article. Seriously, I'm not convinced. The normal user has nothing to do with inner development. How do commercial projects such as Leopard handle those development issues?

Reply Parent Score: 1

superstoned Member since:
2005-07-07

To answer your last question: they don't. They also release... Seen the many complaints about the latest Mac OS X? And don't even start looking for ppl who have trouble with Vista...

Reply Parent Score: 4

Read more of this thread... >
superstoned Member since:
2005-07-07

And about the reported visual issues, many of those have been fixed, many have not. As I said, there is a lot which can be fixed by KDE itself. But there also is a lot which we can't fix. And that stuff also has been reported. But not fixed. Now, more ppl will complain, or fee the urge to actually send in patches - and it will get fixed faster. That's one of the things we wanted to happen, for sure.

Reply Parent Score: 2