Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 217.171.129.72]
on July 15, 2008 10:57 PM
Thank you Bruce, a very good article. I've publicly criticised you in the past for not talking to the devs first and the subsequently inaccurate articles, so I'm very happy to publicly acknowledge the excellent job you've done here.
I tend to agree that the main thing that went wrong is that we probably failed to realise that there were so many new users out there who have little understanding of the way the FOSS ecosystem works, the way KDE works, and the historical perspective of what a .0 release implies. Ask any hacker what a .0 release implies, they know, but someone recently crossed over from the dark side? Perhaps we do need to document these types of things somewhere, a kind of Dummies Guide to the Free Software Community.
For those still complaining about the 4.0 number, it's a technical thing, numbering it anything else would loose the implication for developers that the library code comes with a API and Binary compatibility guarantee. That's one of those sort of things we need to explain better to new users.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
What went wrong with the KDE 4 release?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 217.171.129.72] on July 15, 2008 10:57 PMI tend to agree that the main thing that went wrong is that we probably failed to realise that there were so many new users out there who have little understanding of the way the FOSS ecosystem works, the way KDE works, and the historical perspective of what a .0 release implies. Ask any hacker what a .0 release implies, they know, but someone recently crossed over from the dark side? Perhaps we do need to document these types of things somewhere, a kind of Dummies Guide to the Free Software Community.
For those still complaining about the 4.0 number, it's a technical thing, numbering it anything else would loose the implication for developers that the library code comes with a API and Binary compatibility guarantee. That's one of those sort of things we need to explain better to new users.
#