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List: quanta-devel
Subject: [quanta-devel] KDE 4.0 release plan
From: Andras Mantia <amantia () kde ! org>
Date: 2007-03-15 21:03:35
Message-ID: 200703152303.35542.amantia () kde ! org
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Hi,
some days ago a release plan for KDE 4.0 was posted on the
kde-core-devel list and it is up for discussion. Unfortunately there is
no such team as KDEWebDev anymore, as much as I would want to see it,
but I still post this information here and I'm waiting for comments and
discussion, maybe there are still some people reading this list.
So first shortly about the plan itself, the important points for us:
1) 1st of April 2007: some kind of freeze in kdelibs. As this date is
quite close, it might happen that some KDE libraries will not be in the
4.0 release! Trunk should contain only KDE4 code, which for us means
that we should remove Kommander from trunk. Kommander was never ever
ported to KDE4, while the rest of KDEWebDev was at least ported in a
sense that it compiles and links with Qt4 and KDELibs4. Kommander is
simply disabled from compilation. So the question is: what will happen
with Kommander???
2) 1 June 2007, Feature Freeze: basicly it means that any of our
applications should be feature ready in 2,5 months.
3) Start: 25 September 2007, Release Candidate. So the KDE 4.0 release
should be expected around October.
My opinion about the plan was that the KDE libraries freeze is too
close, but the majority (from the release-team mailing list) was in
favour of 1st of April. But this issue doesn't affect us as application
developers that much, it rather helps to work on a more stable base, so
we can take an early freeze as a good thing, except that it might not
have KNewStuff2 in, for example.
More important is the Feature Freeze on 1st of June and the release is
September. KDEWebDev contains the following applications:
- KFileReplace: as far as I know there was no other development than
script porting and porting done by Laurent Montel.
- KImageMapEditor: as I saw the author, Jan Schafer worked on the KDE4
version, so this is GOOD.
- KLinkStatus: from the commits I think Paulo is working on it.
- Kommander: as I said nothing was done
- KXSLDbg: as far as I see it is the same issue as with KFileReplace
- Quanta: some parts were ported, some new parts were started, it is
very unfinished, but see below.
The module might be released with only some applications from it, and
this is a real possibility not only in case of KDEWebDev, but other
parts of KDE as well, like KDEPIM or KDevelop. That means that is very
much possible that the KDE 4.0 release will not contain ALL the
applications from KDE 3.5.x, and it might even miss some important
apps, like KMail. Also from the discussions it became clear the KDE 4.0
might be just some kind of intermediate release between the 3.x series
and the 4.x series, in the sense that the next KDE release might break
library binary compatibility. Some even suggested to name it as KDE
3.9. ;) The idea of doing the release as the plan says is that KDE 4 is
already late and without such plan it would be never ready and in worst
case Qt5 might come out before KDE 4.0. :-(
Taking into account the above, I think that in kdewebdev the situation
will be that it gets released without Kommander and Quanta, or in worst
case only with KImageMapEditor and KLinkStatus. Why? Because releasing
a version which is inferior to the KDE 3.5.x version is worse than not
releasing at all, as the old version can still be used under KDE 4.
If - for example - KFileReplace works just as good with this automatic
porting (and some refinement) as the 3.5.x version, but doesn't offer
any new features or even new bugfixes, it can be released.
Releasing Kommander is out of question right now as its development was
not started at all.
Now about Quanta... There are several problems with Quanta4. One is that
right now Quanta development is a one person job and that person is
kind'a lost the motivation. That would be me, and the lost of
motivation is several:
- there is a high amount of work which means get the old code, split it,
create new plugins from it and try to make it to work as good as the
old one. Work which is not so demanding (when its about thinking), but
can take a lot of time.
- I'm alone. Working in a team is so much better and more motivating.
Jens helped with Quanta4 a lot and I enjoyed when he was here. We made
good progress both times, even if last year I was on a point to throw
everything out due to performance issues. Jens moved back to Germany
from Cambodia not so long ago, I don't even know if he has an internet
connection right now, but I'm sure he is busy with his (new) life....
- some things have changed in my life as well: a baby and an illness
which doesn't want to go away.
For this reason the Quanta4 development is almost stopped. Whenever I
sit down to work, I enjoy much more to do some hacking on the old
Quanta (and there is plenty of things to do - fix - there as well!) or
on some website ;-). This might be because I'm more familiar with that
code and also because such kind of hacking is usually bugfixing and I
get feedback for the work. While the Quanta4 work is something that
might hit the users only in several months (the best scenario), and
until then if I'm alone almost nobody will even try to start Quanta....
That is about me. But there are also technical reasons why Quanta4
development is delayed. Quanta4 is radically different in the
architecture from Quanta3. The latter was a monolithic application, the
new one is plugin based using the KDevelop platform. The new code is
more understandable and documented and I like it very much and I'm sure
in the end it will be fun to hack on it. KDevelop suffered also a
rewrite between KDE 3 and KDE 4 and it is very likely that they cannot
keep up the KDE 4 schedule. This is one of the reasons why Quanta
cannot keep it up as well. There were times when I very much disliked
what and how is happening inside KDevelop and I even thought that we
should go on our own way, but the benefits of sharing the
infrastructure are soo big, that we really should try to overcome the
problems and work with them. For example if we just think about the UI:
there won't be any MDI library in KDE4. KMDI is dead and we have to use
the UI developed inside KDevelop, otherwise we have to write our own
UI... Of course sharing things like VCS integration or find & replace
is also a big plus for us.
I have to see again where are they, hopefully in much better state.
The second technical problem is the parser. Last year we wrote a new
parser with Jens, which is very nice, is quite well documented, seems
to work, but .... only for XML, only for initial parsing and doesn't
build a real node tree. As you can see we have lot of things to do with
the parser and if we don't do it, it basicly means that we cannot
really progress in other parts as well.
From the above issues the node tree question is the important one.
There were high hopes the KDE4 will have a KHTML (khtml2) that is
easier to use and that we can store everything we need in KHTML and
this way we can do a clean and good implementation of the WYSIWYG mode.
I think this will not happen. Jens might disagree with me, but for me
using KHTML for storage as of now is a dead end and we should go back
to our own tree. And if nobody will help to test and work with KHTML as
a DOM storage this is what I WILL do. What does it mean? It will
probably mean that there won't be any VPL mode...
Parsing non-XML parts needs some state machines. This is not that hard
to do, and probably it is fun as well. Parse-while-type is the biggest
challenge. I have some experience with it, and I know how much headache
it can cause. Actually right now I'm debugging some crashes in
Quanta3's parser which are most likely caused by this part of the
code...
Still, even without a complete new parser there are parts of Quanta3
which could be spearated and ported to KDE 4, one thing that comes into
my mind is the CSS editor. Any volunteer for this?
So this is about our future. Not so bright, but not black.
And here is the original RFC about the release plan. KDEWebDev related
comments can come as a reply to this mail, generic Release Plan
comments should go directly to kde-core-devel:
--------------------------
[RFC] KDE 4.0 Release Roadmap
From: Allen Winter <winter@kde.org>
To: kde-core-devel@kde.org
CC: KDE release coordination <release-team@kde.org>
Date: 2007-03-14 14:22
Howdy,
Hereby we, the Release Team, present a draft KDE 4.0 Release roadmap
which has
been discussed on our mailinglist the past few weeks. It's an optimistic
schedule
that aims to release in late October, based on 3 Beta's and 2 release
candidates.
We tried to make a schedule that pleases as many people as possible, but
you
will understand that everyone has their own favorite agenda. So when
commenting
on the schedule you will need to think about who will benefit from the
change
and who will have trouble with it. Your personal interest might not be
the one
of the group.
KDE 4.0 will not contain all features announced nor promised: these will
come during the lifetime of KDE 4. We can probably switch quickly to a
KDE 4.1 release if there are major subsystems ready for merging soon
after
the KDE 4.0 hits the streets. Also remember that we have been porting
for
a couple years and we need to get this show on the road.
Release soon and release often.
Discuss.
Allen, KDEPIM Release Dude
PS: there still remains a great need for people to volunteer as release
coordinators for several of our modules. The current coordinators list,
along with other KDE 4 Release info can be found at
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE4ReleaseInfo
It would be great if we had at least a point of contact per KDE module.
KDE4.0-Roadmap.txt
KDE 4.0 Roadmap
===============
Milestone: Subsystem Freeze
Date: 1 April 2007
Goals:
* From this date forward, no major KDE subsystem can be committed to
kdelibs.
* The location of all classes are fixed within kdelibs
* Trunk is expected to contain KDE4 code only now. This effectively
means
that all scripts processing translations for KDE3 in trunk will
cease.
* Extragear applications that want to release based on KDE3 are
expected
to move to /branches/stable and work from there.
* The buildsystem requirements are fixed; i.e, must not require a
version of cmake greater than 2.4.5.
Milestone: Alpha Release + kdelibs soft API Freeze
Date: 1 May 2007
Goals:
* Qt 4.3 is required from here until release.
* The kdelibs API is frozen. This means that the classes and interfaces
are
not allowed to change, except with permission of the core developers.
* To make an API change, post a kdelibs API exception request to the
kde-core-devel mailinglist with an explanation and the code. If there
are no objections after a week, the change can be committed.
NOTE: all affected modules must continue to compile and work as
expected.
Milestone: Feature Freeze
Date: 1 June 2007
Goals:
* The KDE main modules are frozen for new features.
* No new features are allowed, the focus is on stabilizing the
applications
and fixing all bugs.
* The main module maintainers must indicate if they will follow the
release
schedule or will divert and not be released together with KDE 4.0.
Milestone: Beta Cycle, Full kdelibs API Freeze
Start: 25 June 2007 End: 24 September 2007 Duration: 3 months
(estimated)
Goals:
* From this date forward, a Beta Version will be published every month
until most grave bugs are resolved.
* The kdelibs API is now frozen solid.
* Translations are included starting with the second Beta, thus
beginning
a string freeze. Exceptions can be requested on the kde-i18n
mailinglist.
Milestone: Release Candidate Cycle
Start: 25 September 2007 End: 22 October 2007 Duration: 4 weeks
(estimated)
Goals:
* From this date forward, a Release Candidate will be released every
two weeks until *all* grave bugs are resolved.
* After the first Release Candidate there is a total release freeze.
This means only regressions (breakage caused due to the KDE4 port)
or grave bugs can be fixed, but nothing else.
* With the first Release Candidate, a list of languages which will be
included with the KDE 4.0 release will be made available, based on
the
usual rules.
Milestone: KDE 4.0 Released
Date: 23 October 2007
Goals:
* This date is based on an estimated 3 Beta's and 2 Release Candidates.
-------------
Andras
--
Quanta Plus developer - http://quanta.kdewebdev.org
K Desktop Environment - http://www.kde.org
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