KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software [LWN.net]

KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Posted Jan 30, 2009 17:14 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373)
In reply to: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software by malor
Parent article: KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

You really need to chill, dude. The past is the past and cannot be changed.

OK 4.0 should have been called "4.0 Developer Release/Foundations" or something, but other than that it was OK to release. That would have made the "KDE 4.0 is not KDE4" excuse more understandable.
But it did work and the libs were done. You cannot wait for 10 years to be totally perfect (just look at E17 ... that does obviously not work)
It had a lot of missing features and very few ported apps but people were able to use it productively AND IT WAS A GREAT STARTING POINT! (just look at 4.2 now)

So ..

Lessons learned:

1. Don't just call a release that mostly/only sets new foundations "$X+1.0" or people will whine for YEARS (like you do)
2. If you don't want distros to ship your stuff without fall back solutions make that very clear (mostly to Fedora devs)
3. Provide the OGG links for your blip.tv videos because then nobody can complain about a nearly perfect release [anouncement] (4.2)

Did I miss something?

I hope people will read this post before KDE 5.0 based on Qt5 is released ;)

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Yes, there are something else...

Posted Jan 30, 2009 20:10 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Did I miss something?

Yes:
2a. If you preach that proper way is to install two versions of stuff at the same time - at least make it possible.

All distributions which shipped KDE3 and KDE4 in the same box were forced to heavily patch the thing. You can not just "./configure ; make ; make install" KDE3 and KDE4 on the same system (unlike GNOME 1.x/GNOME 2.x) - this makes all such talks hypocrisy. Even this "feature" was unfinished (granted - it was in the same state as everything else: mostly, but not 100% complete).