KDE 4.0.1 Released

Thanks for your response, I did not mean to single out Plasma particularly, but I did read
somewhere that the rc1 was issued despite Plasma not being in a releasable state at that
point.  If that was wrong then apologies, qw I tried rc1 and the version was so bare, nothing
useful but Konqueror that I could try out.  Going to a CVS version, resulted in not being able
to log in at all.  rc2 was a different story.

The reason for commenting, was that the whole experience was shall we say, less than pleasant.
There seems to have been quite a lot of heat in the KDE development community surrounding the
whole biz.  I did try out later things like gwenview.  I also noticed some good signs for
konqueror web browser in future, but also some very apparent bugs on very common websites; I
don't think it took widespread test to find those, indeed afer submitting a bug, turned out
others had seen that already, and there was no issue reproducing it.

A call for testing went out, some of us tried to answer it, found the machinery for getting
the deliverables to testers was "iffy", that developers didn't necessarily appreciate bug
reports, that there was arguments in blogs and on IRC, and without some coherent docs on
changes for the release for KDE3 users some of the most obvious issues were usability ones.
There was frustration in having put in the effort to join the test, that getting fresh code to
bug report on was difficult.

IMO a personal opinion, I don't believe that an appeal for testers for an alpha version, then
beta, and real rc would not have got enough response.  I do think pushing X.0.0 out of door,
in an early beta state gives a bad impression of FOSS quality.

Secondly it is my view that the aggro surrounding the release, with folk getting very heated
was due to the pressure for 4.0.0; and many ppl trying it out and submitting confused bug
reports, when many developers must have known already that their stuff was broke.

Obviously Aaron, you have strong sense of correctness in pushing out the X.0.0 as "eat your
children".  All I can say is that if there'd been an appeal for test of alpha, and I could
actually install it, I would have done.  So I think the participation levels rising, is more
down to getting the code out to ppl, that is the part of early and often.  Because KDE is
tough to build yourself, compared to say the linux kernel, binaries were more practical.  FWIW
a lot of the issues I perceived (but wern't bug describable) have surfaced on blogs and in
reviews, so my impression of it wasn't unique.

As you say KDE is big and complicated, it was not possible to find and report subtle bugs,
pre-4.0 because the environment was too low quality.  When things are really screwy on basic
features and crashing frequently you have to stick to simple reports, rather than chase
shadows on possible Heissenbugs etc caused by wild pointers.

Porting to Qt4, an integrated environment means you must do some big bang, which is going to
be difficult.  And I agree and understand with reasons given for re-working stuff which had
gone through "ricocco" and were almost "rubble".

But, I am hopeful and optimistic about the release.  The rapid progress, suggests that any
differences in opionions are about 2 months, in a way it becomes self-fulfilling, if x.0.0 is
going to be an early beta or rc1 quality release then the community will avoid your
pre-releases, and wait for that to begin testing.