Interview With The KDE And GNOME Release Managers

An anonymous reader writes "It has to be tough, keeping projects as big as GNOME and KDE organized, but that is the job given to those projects' 'release managers.' In an interview on Linux and Main, KDE's Dirk Mueller and GNOME's Jeff Waugh discuss their wacky, devil-may-care, hell-bent-for-leather, zany, fun-filled world -- the shadow, as T.S. Eliot put it, between the idea of a release and its reality."

Comments

Let me be specific in my applause.

[buswolley]

I applaude the work of leaders, teams ,and freelancers, who have given their free time(and a lot more) to a project that will mean so much to poor communites around the world. These poor communities now have access to technology that can uplift and enrich their lives without breaking their wallet. perhaps .. technologies such as these will do much to ammend the huge discrepancy between rich and poor. Thank you, in the purest sense possible.

I can associate with this !

[StArSkY]

As a project Manager I can really associate with these guys..

I became a release manager at the company where I used to work by volunteering... it nearly gave me a heart attack after 18 months.

Release dates are set at standard intervals becasue theat's the way it has always been done ;)

Scope changes to meet time available ;) If it looks to tough to finish in time, delay it for the next release.. I have seen releases with 50 updates and fixes scaled back to 10-15.

Time to code ! bah no release manager has time for sleep, family or counter-strike..

and all of the above explains why I now do Business Continuity rather than release management ;) Mind you I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see how project teams, communities and stakeholders react to what happens with software releases. As the release manager you are one of the few who ever gets to see all sides of the argument.

Re:I have a question

[paladin_tom]

My question is, is there any project of the same calibre (of would be soon), that does a native look and feel (modern and cool, like in movies) for Linux/BSD's ?

Amma, the destops you see in movies look cool on the screen, but that's their only good point. Their user interfact is horrible. Movie producers purposefully give computers on movies a "computerish" look; for example, movie computers often have green text (a la the text in The Matrix, when Neo sees it), which has been obsolete for years -- it's hard on the eyes.

Movie destops also have an excessive amount of animation. Trust me, you'd hate any desktop that worked that way -- it'd run like absolute molasses.

The user experience I've had that most closely resembles a movie desktop is application built using Flash, like you find on web sites and enhanced CDs. These apps try to emulate the look and feel of movie desktops.

Re:I have a question

[Arandir]

Let me take your unwritten assumptions in order.

Assumption: The goal of GNOME and KDE is to convert Windoze users.

Truth: There are as many goals for these projects as there are developers. The goal of converting Windows users is definitely on the list somewhere for some developer, but overall it is very low on the totem pole. Much higher are the goals of "scratching my itch", "improving the desktop I use", and "writing my application in this awesome development framework I've found."

Assumption: Windoze users will be more comfortable in a cloned Windoze environment.

Truth: There are two kinds of Windows users. Those that can't stand change and those that want to get away from that crappy desktop. Nothing is going to please the former but the genuine article available only from Microsoft. The latter don't want that article, which is why they're leaving.

Assumption: GNOME and KDE emulate the Windoze look and feel.

There is some resemblance between GNOME/KDE and Windows. But it's superficial only. Take a second glance and there's no comparison. The Windows desktop is ugly and very low in usability. On the other hand, both GNOME and KDE have great usability and look good. There is no comparison between Kicker/Panel and the Windows taskbar. There is no comparison between KWin/Sawfish and the Windows "window manager". There is no comparison between Konqueror/Nautilus and the Windows Explorer. Etc, etc, etc.

Assumption: There is a native look and feel for Linux/BSD somewhere if I can find it.

Truth: There is not a native look to Linux/BSD. Trust me, I've checked. That's because there isn't *a* native look, but multiple native looks. Among them are GNOME and KDE.

There is no centralized authority over the *Nix look and feel, so there will never be just one, no matter how hard Redhat tries.

Assumption: The desktops in movies are modern and cool.

Truth: They sure look modern and cool, but they also look like usability nightmares.

Re:Can someone explain what "i18n" is?

[jjoyce]

Internationalization. It's abbreviated "i18n" because there's an "i", 18 more letters, then an "n".

Re:Can someone explain what "i18n" is?

[JabberWokky]

It's all the translation strings for every language. If you write an app for yourself, you can just write it in the language you use. If you want it to be used around the world, you have to provide a seperate translation for every single string: the menus, buttons, documentation, mouseovers... everything. In an open source project you then have to run it past seperate language maintainers to proof read all the translations.

KDE has very impressive i18n tools (Fire up kbabel and take a look if you're running KDE right now), and I'd assume that any major project (Gnome, Mozilla, etc) all have nice tools as well. Unfortunatly, due to an oversight in Unicode, KDE's support for tlhIngan Hol uses the english alphabet.

--
Evan

Re:Mozilla did it better

[luge]

Um, GNOME does all of those things (except smoketesting, which we hope will be coming soon). We release on a regular 3 week schedule (with 6 month major releases), we use bugzilla religiously, and we use tinderbox and release daily snapshots on multiple platforms (via both ftp and Red Carpet.) So... frankly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about :)

P.S. Leaf and Brendan would probably consider you a troll. I sure do.