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Releases
by mishgosh on Saturday 21/May/2005, @12:21
One thing that has been on my mind for a while now is how the fast pace of development that is required of something tracking so many different protocols sits with the fairly well-spaced releases of something like KDE.

And with the recent breakage of MSN (which is far more MSN's fault, though why they should let me use their network, I'm not sure, especially as I try hard to remove Windows when I find it :) ), it looks like a bit of a liability.

When I got into FLOSS a while back, I often heard "release early and often". I understand that for various reasons, KDE only wants to release stable software, and that means releases need to be well-planned. It's amazing they release as often as they do, considering the size of the codebase.

I also understand why Kopete wants to be in the official KDE releases. I would, if I was an application. But we're in a situation where normal users are going to have to patch kopete from the SVN copy, and if I'm not wrong, compile it within 3.4's kdenetwork package. The minimum complexity is likely to involve a patch against that tree, yes? So what was gained by shipping a solid, stable kopete is all a loss when these users try to connect to MSN.

Or switch to Gaim, which I used to use until I found the better status support of kopete indispensable.

Or, could kopete be made to compile outside of a larger source tree, and thus regain independence of release to a certain extent, without sacrificing any of the political and organisational (and QA?) benefits of being in the big KDE releases?

I'd love to see releases made between KDE releases, which would mean periods of breakage were minimized (as I'm sure the fix is done already), and users would benefit from all the other great features going into it every week.
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Re: Releases
by Pat on Saturday 21/May/2005, @13:41
kopete from svn trunk is pretty stable and you can compile it on KDE trunk,3.4 and even 3.3 so all you need is svn up everytime something goes wrong with <enter your favorite protocol here> :)

here are the instructions http://kopete.kde.org/index.php?page=cvs

it's really easy and allows you to test new cool features such as get new stuff and all.
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  • Re: Releases
    by mishgosh on Sunday 22/May/2005, @13:37
    Yep, that worked- using the 3.4 branch, not the trunk (which wouldn't compile for me, failing on some v4l-related stuff).

    For anyone else- honestly, it was very easy, and no, I didn't have to download or compile all of kdenetwork. Even on my twin P3 500, it didn't take long.

    Cheers
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