I think there is a wide unexplored area between "Plasma is THE solution 
to everything desktop related" and "Let us fork KDE4", and we are 
somewhere in it, slowly moving to stabilization.
But it is clear to me that there is a problem, and sometimes it takes 
extreme reactions for us to recognize it.
I agree 100% with Ian Wadham's message. I do not consider myself a 
newbie, but I am completely lost with Plasma terminology and 
implementation details. Looking back, I can see that this is a 
consequence of choosing not to work in this particular module, but this 
should be ok. I prefer to concentrate on kdeedu and kdegames , as I 
consider that my limited experience is coding is better used there. But 
what I am seeing is that KDE4 is losing energy and momentum in these 
modules. We used to have lots of developers active 6 to 18 months ago. I 
think this is caused at least a little bit by the lack of what users 
(and developers not involved directly with Plasma) perceive as a stable 
desktop. It seems all this is fixable, but we have to recognize that 
this puts strain in other areas of the project. Several developers from 
games and edu have jumped in to help the desktop efforts, which is 
commendable. But it still creates a sense of "void" in our little 
communitities.

So, the first step is to recognize that there is/was a problem with 
Plasma, including management and scheduling decisions in 4.0, and this 
lead us to a situation where the project will spend 1 year or more (from 
4.0 to 4.2) with a semi-usable desktop. And that this creates 
frustration and directly affects our ability to develop new applications 
and motivate our developers and users. It affects our ability to deploy 
our 4.x applications to some big users. It affects my ability to install 
KDE 4 in my mom's machine. See the recent Debian discussion for example, 
it appears 4.1 will not make it in Lenny as the default, though gladly 
it would possibly be available in backports.

So, something was wrong with Plasma deployment. Part of it was known, 
part of it was not expected, and a course correction was taken after 4.0 
shipped. This is not a bad position to recognize. It creates sympathy. 
It generates understanding and the will to help. And with it, comes the 
realization that, after 4.0 shipped, lots of developers understood this 
need and flocked to help (from games/edu I can see at least milliams, 
jpwhiting, fregl, annma and others.) So our community has recognized 
this problem, knows that it needs to be fixed, and is doing the best it 
can to help (including the sprint, for example.) Constructive criticism 
(constructive is the keyword) needs to be accepted, so this thread, at 
least to me, has some value, in recognizing that maybe we are not yet 
managing the desktop expectations with the humbleness necessary to 
gather support from the community outside KDE.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini
 
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