In an effort to attract more contributors, programmers or not, the Quality Team was lauched today. Read the announcement at The Dot, and an opinion piece on the benefits of the new project is at Newsforge.
KDE Announces the Quality Team
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Small correction:
…and an opinion piece on the benefits of the new project is available at Newsforge.
one thing i dont like is that you must have an password, give them yours email, and so on, before telling them abouth a bug.
when i read some of the post her at osnews, people are telling about many things that went wrong or things that they dont like with, the distro, or apps.
and this bugzilla aint the easyest thing to use.
but is there any place where userers can ask for programs that linux need? like now in windows i use NetLimiter ( http://netlimiter.com/ ) i found many sharpers for linux but not for one program, tc dont work on one program..
soo.. where can we linux users ask for things like that..
Hi
yes. it does require your email address but it is done so for a reason. if developers require more info what do they do?.how to bug reporters track bugs?. what if you need to reopen a bug?. vote on some other bugs? track the number of bugs reported by a user or tester?
It is very easy to register in bugzilla and the advantages overweight the disadvantages.
the quality team initiative is similar to the kernel janitors team. it finds midway between developers and end users shielding developers from mundate tasks so that they can concentrate more on their core skills
Rahul
of course, you mean Kuality, right?
Hi
“of course, you mean Kuality, right?”
No. its quality. the K branding either replaces c or adds in front. just like Microsoft something in windows or isomething in macs
Rahul
I wonder if the KDE folks migiht provide more information for designers and artists.
I checked out the Quality Team site. As a designer, I’d like to contribute to the KDE project, but it’s not clear how to do that. I’m still new to Linux but I’ve begun making (small) contributions to Scribus, another project I find very useful. And I love KDE. Maybe kde-look.org is still the best way.
http://artist.kde.org
http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+Artists
Its about time for something like this. KDE really needs to do a good job marketing itself, and something like this could be very important. The “HIG theory” section of the KDE Interface Guidelines linked to a pretty cool article:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/antimac.html
Basically, it makes the following points:
– The userbase of today is *not* the userbase that the Mac initially targetted back in the 1980’s.
– An entire generation of people that grew up with computers are now coming onto the scene. The interface most suitable for these people is not necessarily the same as that suitable for the people the Mac initially targetted.
– Many Mac design hallmarks, such as direct manipulation, point and click, and user-control of *all* actions, are constraining to users who understand computers, and hurt efficiency by making the user perform tedious, repetitious actions better left to the computer. Converting a folder full of images to another format is given as an example.
– Purely point and click interfaces make no use of one humanity’s strongest skills — the capacity for language.
– Because a new generation of computer users have training in computers, interfaces can evolve to make a different trade-off between intuitiveness and efficiency.
Given the importance of computers to today’s world, especially among office workers and students who spend much of the day working with one, I think such an evolved interface would be a great way to improve productivity and the usefulness of computers.
I wonder why so many people make jokes on K-ization.
Do you know that it is natural in some languages?
Keramik is a valid word in some languages, kualiti,
, kualitas.., and the list go on.
This interesting article by Kde-Quality co-founder Tom Chance is quite revealing.
http://www.newsforge.com/technology/04/03/01/1511242.shtml
What Mr. Chance talks about is not quality auditing but how
Kde can become more inclusive; something I seriously doubt. It’s essentially “universal suffrage” for Kde contributors. As it stands now, the reigning paradigm is one of meritocracy: those who actually develop call the shots. This sounds like a fair arrangement until you realize that developers, without user feedback and support can create an application so complex (and buggy) that no volunteers will want to work on it (like Koffice). Or invent “features” that are actually a form of digital torture, like the URL parser popup that was in Klipper.
The inclusiveness is necessary. The developers need only ask themselves if they *really* want to spend hours feeding a printer reams of paper, in a effort to find out why the fonts are run together on hardcopy. Indeed their time would be much better spent on other things such as valgrinding or linting code. Of course if the they wish to cling to their winner-take-all definition of meritocracy then they will have to do it all themselves. It’s lonely at the top.
I think one good aspect of the KDE Quality Project is that some respected developers are actually in charge, so everyone else doesn’t look at it as just a bunch of people bitching about stuff they didn’t code. That respectability is going to go a long way to allowing this project to be successful. I also like the idea of projects specifying what tasks they’d like offloaded. Eg: the KDE PIM pages that are currently up. I’m sure a lot of developers would love to delegate some of these things to people who have the time, energy, and skills to do it.
imho, kde is already pretty well ahead in terms of documentation but it is still an encouraging sign of maturity.
Am I the only one that would like to help with some KDE development stuff, but just find the task of getting into it all just too big? You have to track CVS of everything in order to be able to even compile any new software, and that’s just not an option for most people. I don’t want to run a possibly unstable CVS version on my primary development system just to do some minor development on a small application. For instance Debian unstable still ships with 3.1 and that version can’t be used to help out with some app that depend on 3.2+. I do know C++ and Qt well, so that part is no problem either.
And no, helping out with documentation isn’t for me, I can hardly even write in my own language, let alone in English or something else.
All you need to do is have kdelibs+kdebase CVS installed somewhere (not as your desktop, unless you work on it), and have checked-out the module for the app you are helping with.
Then update kdelibs+kdebase once a week and/or when your app doesn´t build.
It´s not all that onerous if you have decent bandwidth. If you don´t it´s pretty much impossible to hack at KDE´s CVS.
However, it´s much simpler to hack at stuff like apps in kdeextragear, since they usually don´t depend on the HEAD branch. Or KDE apps hosted on sf.net, for the same reason.
Contact me at ariya AT pandu DOT org. I can send the instruction on how to setup minimum unstable kdelibs and kdebase so you don’t need to mess up your stable 3.1 and still able to do development.
> You have to track CVS of everything in order to be able
> to even compile any new software
Not quite but almost. Koffice depends on kdepim (IIRC) and it is difficult to compile. The problem is that Kde aspires to be this super desktop that does everything and tries to outperform Windows. What results is a complicated and, on some distros, a buggy UI.
Mr. Hashem is correct in saying that something has to be done to prevent talkers from just complaining about software they did not code. However the current problem is poorly designed software. An application that is crammed with conjectural features, that end users may not want, and that is buggy is not a contribution; it’s a form of sabotage actually.
That being the case, there is no reason to contribute time and/or money to a project that is dismissive of end user feedback. Kde is noted for it’s high handed treatment of critics. Rather than consider change, the Kde developers usually bristle with indignation. Go look in the Koffice archives and see how they treated Eric Raymond and his wife Kathy (March 2002 IIRC).
To contribute artwork you can either:
– Subscribe to [email protected] (see lists.kde.org)
– Contact wimer aT suse doT de, everaldo aT everaldo doT com or me.
– Contribute outstanding stuff to kde-look.org (if it’s really outstanding you can bet that it will be included in KDE 3.3 anyways 😉
I’ll raise the bet: you can get all your money back.
Sometimes I just can’t believe the stuff some people come up with.
Kde accepts monetary donations
http://www.kde.org/support/#Money
but doesn’t require them. Those are volunteer contributions, just like KDE gives you volunteered code.
If you have a problem with people making you gifts, by all means, don’t make any gifts yourself.
On the other hand, you do realize that the contributed money is probably about 1/10000th of the value of the code, right?
Or, let’s look at it another way. Suppose you are a mac user. You like Javascript on Safari? Well, guess where it came from.
Or suppose you are a SkyOS fanboy? Where did the web browser there came from?
Or suppose you are a gnome fancier? What do you think made GNOME possible?
So, by all means, keep your nickel.