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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Next release called 1.2?
From:       Torsten Rahn <rahn () astrophysik ! uni-kiel ! de>
Date:       1999-08-24 12:07:17
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Though I don't have any strong opinion about this topic
anymore I'll add my 4 KB;-) of pros and cons here that I
 collected. I don't know the reasons that made the kde-pr-team 
raise up this question again. So if I forgot anything feel 
free to add cons and pros ...

pros:
====
+ there are addtional features so it's not just yet
  another bugfix release:

  o kdevelop: a fully featured and easy to use development 
    environment for KDE /UnixX11. The existence of kdevelop 
    will hopefully result in a huge amount of additional 
    KDE-apps.  
  o kthememgr & kwm-themes
  o large & hicolor -icons: (for kde-artists this has been 
    probably the major-release as it required much more 
    work than any other previous release and probably 
    more work than KDE 2.0 will need.)
  o (afaik) additional japanese language support (?): which is
    a very huge step as I've been told on Linuxtag 
    as japanese is the most difficult language to be
    supported.

+ By linux-kernel-tradition stable versions have even 
  version-numbers and we should follow this linux-tradition 
  for psychologic/pr-reasons and to avoid confusion among 
  newbies who have been told that only even-numbered 
  apps are stable.

It's not easy to decide if the following points belong to 
'pros' or 'cons': 

+/- GNOME decided to name its next release 1.2 although
  Miguel claims that it won't have any additional features.
  To avoid that newbies might prefer GNOME because of its 
  higher version-number this might be a (though questionable) 
  reason  for naming it 1.2.
  
+/- from the pr-point-of-view a 1.2 would certainly draw much
  more attention to this release than a 1.1.2. So in short
  terms naming it 1.2 would be quite positive. The question
  that remains to be answered: 'Is it worth a 1.2? -- Will people
  be disappointed by the number/quality of features that 
  have been added?' The answer to this question decides wether
  naming it 1.2 would be positive in long terms.

cons:
====
- the number of additional features are not even comparable
  to those that have been added for 1.1.1. So naming it 
  1.2 would neither be honest nor consistent.
- we don't want to compete with GNOME in terms of 
  version numbers -- that would be ridiculous and wouldn't
  be in the tradition of the kde-project.
- concerning most of the apps it's just a bugfix-release.
- It would sound like a cheap shot at the gnomes, which want 
  to call their next beta 1.2.

Torsten Rahn

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