Earlier this year, the KDE team released the highly-anticipated 4th major revision of the KDE desktop. Instead of bringing evolutionary changes, KDE 4.0 effectively delivered a complete rewrite of KDE, and as a consequence the first release of the KDE 4 branch lacked a lot of features of KDE 3.x, while also being quite unstable and rough. Many even complained the KDE team shouldn't have released KDE 4.0 as 4.0, but rather as a developer preview release or something similar. During this storm of criticism, the KDE team calmly pointed out that KDE 4.1 would fix many, many of the issues people had with KDE 4.0. Starting today, there's no more pointing towards KDE 4.1: KDE 4.1 has been released today.
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Member since:2006-03-05
Disappeared for a year? We started porting KDE 3 to Qt4 in 2006. Since then we've released alpha and beta releases of KDE4 regularly. We've also released new version KDE3 regularly. In fact, another KDE3 release is around the corner. Calling that "disappearing" is not only at odds with us being accused of hype, but is, on the face of it, utterly ridiculous.
Member since:2006-02-05
disappearing in terms of the end user. developer releases are not real releases that real users should use, and as such your user feedback cycle gets blown out way too far. From the user point of view, 3.5 was at the beginning of 2006, and 4.0 was at the beginning of 2008. That my friend, is waterfall, plain and simple.
Iterative development (release early, release often) means that features should have been put out one at a time every few months as real, full releases. What KDE did was waterfall, which is draw up specs, code like mad, and then release the full shebang when you are done. Only they didn't release when they were done, they released when the pressure got too big from outside sources due to being so far behind schedule, and then turned around and claimed that everyone in the open source world labels beta products as real releases.
As for hype, I'm not accusing the team of that. Any hype that was unwarranted was generated by tech bloggers and the more rabid element of the user base. KDE4.1 is an impressive move forward, and shows alot of vision and technical skill from the project. As a developer who cares alot about process, I think the team should be re-examining theirs, rather then redefining what a release means and blaming everyone outside the team for unfair expectations.
Member since:
2006-02-05
Missing functionality is different then removing existing functionality, and very different then putting out half done functionality that hasn't been tested and is full of bugs. This is what I was saying, kde 4.0 is the exact opposite of an iterative process, they basically disappeared for a year and came back with something completely different.