The first KDE 4.3.0 release candidate

You know, I get so sick of people who complain that there are new features in a release while
their pet bugs aren't solved to their personal satisfaction. As a volunteer free software developer
I feel those armchair managers don't understand at all the way a volunteer works. For me, it's
like this:

* Sunday afternoon: I fix a bug
* Monday: get pinged on irc by a polite user. He asks whether it's normal that krita crashes on
something. I ask him for a stacktrace, get it, fix the bug. Feel like yay!
* Tuesday, I spend some time refactoring something so the next gsoc student has a nice place
to start from. Plus, it's really good for code quality. Add a unit test, too.
* next day, I see a bug has been added. It's a busy day at work, but it's an easy bug, so on the
train home, I fix the bug. When I get home, someone else has added twelve wish list items to
bugzilla. I read them, mentally compare them with the TODO list, but then it's 20:30, time for
dinner, so I eat and forget about them.

Rinse, repeat until Saturday. On Saturday I get up at 8 so I have the morning for Krita. I feel like
giving myself a little present, so I start on a nice, little feature. Should be doable in a day.
Something for myself, because after all these years doing features in response to wishes from
users, I still haven't got the app I want for myself.

Sunday night, I commit the feature, together with notes on two dozen improvements that really
are junior jobs.

Then, after a few months, we release. Guess what's going to be noticed in the release
announcement: that little feature. The guy with the twelve wishes, wishes me a horrible death
for having prioritized my own little wish. Another guy blasts me for not having solved a bug that
was already around in 2001 -- well, it's a bug, but not one that I can solve since I don't have a
color printer of any description so I never print from Krita.

That's life for a volunteer developer, and in the KDE world, we're nearly all in that situation. We
would be way more full of radiant love for the world and kindness to cute animals if people
allowed us once in a while to implement something for ourselves.

(And people should stop getting so defensive when asked "can you please help out
implementing your wonderful suggestion -- since you know what you need and have the
hardware". Not knowing C++ is no problem: if I could learn it, anyone can learn it. Mine is a
very average ability.)