[bt-devel] Towards a 1.7 release - what is missing, who can help

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Thu, 1 May 2008, Martin Gruner wrote:
>
> > The old KDE bug where the paged dialog page selector shows only one item
> > and can be browsed only with PageUp/PageDown has re-appeared with
> > Kubuntu 8.04.
>
> Where can I see that? Please add to the wiki.

I have updated to the fresh Kubuntu 8.04 (actually reinstalled after
some difficulties which took some time) and started "from scratch". The
KDE version is 4.0.3. I haven't tested other KDE4 versions under 8.04.
The bug appears in the config dialog - the bookshelf manager was
affected previously but not now, of course. We may have some faulty code
because there are paged dialogs in the KDE4 distribution and I guess
they work right. So, which one is easier/better, reimplement the config
dialog or try to fix this bug first?

> You are right. Thing is that we also need to actually *have* a release. ;) So
> we should at least now agree that we will not implement new features and port
> KDE>QT only where it is neccessary. If it is, we should do it. Also,
> refactoring should only be done if it is very important or very simple.

This is the most difficult part for me :) I'll try to implement the one
architectural change I'm currently working on (bookshelf change
signal/slot) and then really focus on the bugs.

> We should have a 2.0 for whenever we go crossplatform and actually have at
> least a working windows installer (and possibly one for MacOS too).

Then we agree that the next final release will be 1.7 and the
crossplatform release will start with number 2. But I expect the
crossplatform issues to be so great that we could release Qt-only 2.0
for Linux first and then go for Windows/Mac with version 2.1.

>
> > Could we have betas which are
> > ready for consumption and would be packaged for distros etc?
>
> We can have betas, of course. The distros probably won't package these, but if
> we can get binary packages, we can upload them to our sf site.

Why they wouldn't package? 1.7 is a different app than 1.6 and "beta" is
only a name. The beta release which I'm talking about would be as stable
as this kind of new implementation can be and "beta" warns the end
users. There is much beta or even alpha software packaged for the
distros. BT is not different from other KDE software which has been
written for both KDE3 and 4 - there are separate versions for each and
both may be packaged for the distros. We can write an announcement and
explain the situation clearly for the packagers.

With ready-made beta packages we would get much valuable feedback from
users and maybe more translators or even developers. with 1.7betas we
could have reasonably stable - hopefully crash-free - though not
completely polished public releases and still work towards the more
complete port.


  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)