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Interview With The KDE And GNOME Release Managers

Posted by timothy on from the dedication-defined dept.

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."

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Free and commercial release processes by ColdChrist · · Score: 3, Interesting
    One of the things that's interesting about this article is how closely related the release process for free software is to that for commercial software. Commercial products have many things in their genesis that free products do not, but when it gets to be time to produce a clean release "the aim of the release process is to finish software, not to develop it." Waugh cites that quote from Havoc Pennington as applying to Free Software, but in fact it applies to both. It's a kind of convergent evolution into a niche; the ecological imperatives of product survival force projects to adopt these mechanisms in order to be successful.

    The really interesting question is where does this convergence start? Are the reward systems, involving kudos and problem-solving pleasure for free software, and money for commercial software, fundamentally different? I suspect they're not, and that there is much less difference between an open source project and commercial product development than is sometimes thought. I'd guess that the more successful examples of each strongly resemble each other.

  2. Mozilla did it better by sohp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    KDE and Gnome releases are fine, but compared to the Mozilla build/release process, managed by the enigmatic Leaf, they are 2nd class. Mozilla developers created their own tools to do it, too. Mozilla is cross platform, continuous builds, bug tracking integrated with version control, and they released regularly on a five week cycle (now quarterly), and daily build and smoketests. And once again, Mozilla is cross-platform -- Linux, Windows, and Mac OS 9/X.

    Sorry to crash the party, but I have yet to see KDE or Gnome approach the bar that Leaf and Brendan Eich set high.

  3. Re:Like on Jurassic Park... by adadun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, it wasn't strictly a Unix system - it was an IRIX system.

  4. Re:aint it ironic....... by LMCBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Kdevelop is direct competitor of [the] MS programming environment.

    No, it isn't.

    Most importantly, KDevelop is not a commercial product, so it has nothing to compete for. Sure, it's nice if lots of people use it, but ultimately it matters not at all how many "customers" KDevelop has. As long as there are interested developers, the project will thrive.

    More obviously, KDevelop targets only unix apps; MSVB targets only windows apps. They're in completely different "markets".

    --
    Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.