KDEvelopers on KDE Users

An anonymous reader writes: "KDE developers spent some time this week on their mailing list discussing what motivates them and the extent to which user concerns figure in their decisions. Dennis E. Powell's column on Linux and Main draws excerpts from the exchange, in which he participated, and says that he believes a lot more of this kind of discussion is needed."

Comments

Excellent points brought up by the article

[Sheetrock]

KDE got a lot of excellent programmers because it hit that certain momentum open source needs to survive (the point where you know the project is going to go on with or without you). I think that a lot gave up over the problems of maintaining backward compatibility, however. It's an ugly task, and one of the ones that doesn't particularly encourage anybody to work on it for the fun of it.

Someone said that Open Source will never effectively work on the desktop, because it's far too unstable; you can't program anything really useful for it without spending a lot of time and money nursing it through the inevitable changes the platforms around it create. I respectfully disagree, because I think that whenever there is a will, there's a way, and that when people need something, they're going to create it or maintain it.

There is a great deal of burnout being created by users demanding features in software that the developer isn't being paid for, too. KDE has mostly escaped this thus far, however there is some speculation that GNOME has more momentum because it's the underdog. Let's hope these two projects can continue to bring great things to the Linux desktop.

problem no 1.: lack of tutorials and beginner docu

[Jondor]

I tried a few times to get up and running with KDevelop. Have a KDE programmers book at home, tried every tutorial I could find.. And the results? The KDE programming book doesn't use KDevelop and the best result up till now is a KIO slave for hello world..

What I found to be the biggest problem with KDevelop is the lack of up to date documentation and tutorials. Whatever I found was always based on older versions, different templates etc. I haven't found 1 tutorial which I could go through from beginning to the end and end up with the results I should accourding to the description.

KDevelop is attractive to programmers who are not fluent in KDE, C++ and QT and lacking basic, but up to date and included, tutorials is IMHO one of the biggest things that stops new programmers from using it.

Re:problem no 1.: lack of tutorials and beginner d

[Anonymous Coward]

Your complaint is valid for almost every open source project out there. Documentation does not exist or is out of date. Most OSS developers don't give much of a damn whether the software is documented or not. And if it is documented, it is most likely some tacked on one page afterthought called "README".

Rarest of all are requirements and architectural documents. Essentially there is no way to validate most Open Source Software because there exists no requirements or architecutural documents. Anything goes.

Q: What is this software supposed to do?

A: It does what it does.

These factors make real, legitimate quality assurance an impossibilty. At best QA on Open Source Software consists of ad hoc bug fixes and low level "lint" style syntax checks. Without requirements documents, there is no way to achieve QA in-the-large.

Re:Good user feedback...

[Rogerborg]

• If you want to switch, just do it, don't advertise it.

Good points, but as a developer, I'd appreciate a short factual note saying that a user had switched, and the reasons why. Heck, if half of my users said that they'd switched to open source solution X, I'd have to give serious thought to acknowledging that it might be a better solution, and that my time would be better spent improving it rather than pushing my solution. Sourceforge is absolutely littered with completely obsoleted projects that stagger on through ego and inertia. I'd like to see a see more project pages that say "We're all working on Project X now, and we suggest that you switch too."