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Interview with Sebastian Kuegler, KDE Developer
invisibastard writes "Linux Tech Daily has an interview with KDE's Sebastian Kuegler. Sebastian talks about the KDE 4.0 release event, goes into detail about how KDE has improved its processes and much more. '[...] there are many easy ways to help. The most obvious is helping people installing KDE, answering questions on forums, IRC and other media. Lately, we're getting also an increased amount of requests for speakers. Often local LUGs are interested in talks by KDE knowledgeable people. It might sound a bit scary, representing KDE in your local LUG, but it's really what KDE is about. Everybody comes from a local community, that is where our grassroots are. People often don't think that they are entitled to represent KDE, but that's just not the case at all. In fact, the marketing and promo team have a hard time finding enough speakers for all events. Slides are usually available, so it doesn't need all that much preparation.'
"The fact that the definition of stable varies widely within our userbase and the expectations of everyone doesn't make it any easier."
Unless your userbase consists of no one but fanboys, I would expect the userbase to define "stable" as not crashing every 20 minutes. Shame on KDE for redefining the meaning of a point oh release. I realize they want more people to test their beloved product, but misleading them into doing it was a mistake. In fact, the tradition in open source is in the opposite direction - not calling it a point oh until it's acquired the targeted features and destroys no data.
To summarize: The closer something is to perfection, the easier it is to screw it up when trying to improve it.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The full quote is "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.", it's directed at getting code out there in the open rather than waiting until it is perfect before letting anybody see it. It doesn't mean that you should label anything you can compile as a stable release, just that you shouldn't do all your work behind closed doors until it's perfect. Not to mention the fact that the advice was garnered from the Linux kernel, something significantly smaller than KDE and not anywhere near as directly exposed to end-users. And if that advice is so useful, how come the KDE project doesn't follow two-thirds of it? They have very long release cycles, ignored anybody who told them that it wasn't ready to be called 4.0 and told anybody asking where the missing features were to wait until 4.1.
I'm a KDE user myself, but I would not go so far as to say that. KDE is for power users, and almost all the distributions default to GNOME, which is quite a bit simpler.
The problem is that they are too much like the enlightenment release cycle. KDE tried to do too much in one go. I remember when KDE 4 was supposed to be a short release cycle that was nothing but a straight port to Qt 4. Somehow they decided to totally rewrite everything important and invent major new subsystems that everything critical is based upon — while porting to Qt 4 at the same time! There is simply no way a step that large is compatible with "Release often" or "Listen to your customers", because it's an incredible amount of work just to remain where you are.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
... which is why many people here bitch about them releasing the 4.0 version.
While I do understand the sentiment, I feel this release was kind of jumping in the cold water — not very pleasant, but now it's done, it had to be done either way, and let's please move on. The product is here, bugs are being taken care of, features are being added, just keep swimming... You had been warned anyway.
Ignore this signature. By order.