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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    A few comments on te development cycle.
From:       "Richard Townsend" <rtee () btinternet ! com>
Date:       2002-02-13 11:20:51
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I think kde is terrific and have been using it since redhat 6.0. The
features in this version make kde far better than anything i've seen
yet, but the stability is not good. I dl'd kdeadmin-2.2.2-2.src.rpm
update and opened it to read the docs, it says its alpha not for
distribution! I'm not a complete dummy, i taught myself c++ and
developed a yahtzee clone with Qt which compiles fine on linux i386 and
windows. I would like to re-write it with kdevelop to make it available
to the kde/linux community and become involved in the development of
kde. But despite spending some considerable time on it, i'm not able to
get kdevelop stable enough to be usable (its the first piece of k
software i've used thats crashed the kde system and dumped me back at
the console.)

i'm a capable programmer in several languages (c, c++, perl, 8086...many
more) and offer services as a web developer, but free software or not,
releasing alpha versions is in my book wrong. I know its free, though i
have to pay for it to get it on cd as my dl speed makes dl'ing not
practicle, and i know the developers work on it for free, i've done more
work for free then i've done for money. (To get work as a programmer you
need to have a 'current' portfolio of projects.) No matter how many
features kde has it's no good if no one uses it and the current
development cycle may well put current and potential users off. Replies
to bug reports like 'Fixed in CVS beta 3' are not much use to users of
kde-2.2.2? we don't all have broadband internet access even if we'd like
to.

Do we really need 3 address books in the distro? perhaps i've got this
wrong, but shouldn't users expect later revisions of a releases to be
more stable? instead of earlier revisions being more stable? It maybe
that i've failed to grasp the development cycle, i though it went
something like this:
1/ Develop new version,
2/ release new version,
3/ release bug fix revisions,
4/ release update improvement revisions,
5/ release some more bug fix revisions,
6/ goto 5 and repeat until version is stable, goto 1/

A KDE user.


 
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