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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Krash release (was Re: last style from Mosfet)
From:       Mosfet <mosfet () jorsm ! com>
Date:       1999-07-18 23:02:39
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To a certain extent I agree. Many projects (esp. targeting Linux) release very
early and very often. I have two main concerns with doing an alpha KDE release
at this stage of development. These are all of course my opinion and
impressions.

1) KDE users are not typical of the users who download buggy alpha releases and
just don't worry if things are broken. They expect things to work, and with good
reason. Even if we tell people "This is alpha, this is buggy, do NOT expect
things to work!!!", they will still expect things to be generally functional
because we are KDE. Regretfully because of very active development they are
not. If we were another project we could just release anyways and tell users
this, but being KDE the standards are a little higher and users expect more of
anything coming from us. I would understand if there was only small oddities
here and there, but that is not the case.

2) A lot of the current instability is not because of KDE CVS being in early
development or not getting developer's attention, it is because development has
been so active everything is changing on an almost daily basis. But I doubt
users will understand this. They will see segfaults, assume KDE is much earlier
in development than it actually is, and leave with a bad impression. I think
releasing a alpha at this point can actually make users think that KDE2.0 is
much less developed than it actually is.

On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, Martin Konold wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, Mosfet wrote:
> 
> > I doubt it will work without crash and burning on 80% of users machines.
> > People simply have not been working on stability yet, and if we release even a
> > "preview" we will be flooded with user issues when they shouldn't have been
> > using the system yet at all. We are not near a beta release yet IMHO. 
> 
> YOu are of course ver much correct but still we should try to release
> early and often. (But do not call it stable (1.0 ;-))
> 
> Regards,
> -- martin
> 
> // Martin Konold, Herrenbergerstr. 14, 72070 Tuebingen, Germany  //
> KDE:  A stable GUI for a reliable OS.
-- 
Daniel M. Duley - Unix developer & sys admin.
mosfet@kde.org
mosfet@jorsm.com

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