Re: A HUGE job indeed.

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by James Richard Tyrer on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @07:26

> And we are all just hobby software developers, right?

Actually I don't know what people consider themselves to be. I don't hear anybody else saying that they studied EE/CS in college, perhaps because the culture here denigrates such an education.

> a) And what should our user do with this great KDE 4.0? Doesn't make sense to
> release stuff that is just a port to a new library version.

I notice that when people want to disagree with you that they seem to skip over the adjectives in the sentences. :-) I referred to *radical* changes. Not doing radical changes doesn't mean not doing any changes.

What the user would do with such a release would be to use it. There is supposed to be many improvements in Qt 4.0 and IIUC there are planed improvements to the libraries. This should be enough unless you advocate "featuritis" as the important thing in software development. Adding new features should not be the driver in KDE development now that it is mature software.

Perhaps all will be well. But, I keep reading about completely redoing this, completely redesigning that. I start to wonder how this is going to be done with the "limited manpower".

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by Nicolas Goutte on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @08:01

I would suppose that most of KDE's professional developers have studied IT or something near, in universities or "high schools".

And if EE is "eletrical engineer", then there is at least Eva who is one:
http://www.kde.org/areas/people/eva.html

http://people.kde.org/dirk.html tells me that Dirk Mueller has studied IT.

And probably there are more people having studied anything scientific.

Have a nice day!

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by Nicolas Goutte on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @08:16

See also:
http://www.kde.org/people/gallery.php
that confirms what I have thought and written.

Have a nice day!

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by Paul Eggleton on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @19:48

Hmm, that page needs a little updating...

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by Boudewijn on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @09:34

While I don't disagree with you when you say that the current projected KDE 4.0 may be a little more than we can chew off, I do know that unless you aim high, you must fall short of the requirements..

While I haven't got a CS MA (I'm a linguist, comparative linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan languages of Nepal -- eastern Nepal -- to be precise), I've got about a decade of experience in the software industry. Aim high, damn the certifications and forget about cmm, that's the only way to produce something worthwile. Ours is a craft, not a profession.

And make sure your daily build can be released as-is.

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by James Richard Tyrer on Saturday 13/Aug/2005, @04:22

> KDE 4.0 may be a little more than we can chew off,

That is really my only point. that we should be careful that we don't:

'bite off more than we can chew'.

The history of software projects is littered with the remains of projects that did that. Yes, you are correct that we should aim high, but we need to be realistic regarding what we can accomplish for the first release of KDE-4.

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by ac on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @16:01

I bet most changes which will be actually done will be rather evolutional and consequential for the developers who work on the stuff. It's just that the necessity of BC for the whole 3.x series helt those bigger evolutional changes back until the 4.0 release which allows breaking BC once again. So the huge amount of changes make the effort look "radical", but isn't if you actually look at the details. So calm down and stop worrying. =)

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by Andras Mantia on Friday 12/Aug/2005, @22:22

If CS means "Computing Science" I studied 4 years at the university and before
4 years in school and 2 more years before as hobby. I'm sure (and know) that there are many others who have similar education in the KDE project.
The fact that I don't have a master degree and a doctorate is that I find it useless if you just want to be a developer. ;-) I better learn by experience. I'm sure that sometimes those who learned to code by themselves are better than some who studied at universities.

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Re: A HUGE job indeed.
by James Richard Tyrer on Saturday 13/Aug/2005, @04:26

I'm glad to hear that there are professionally trained people working on the project. Perhaps we can form a group to do what ever.

The question of knowing how to code verses knowing software engineering is an old one that I won't start on here since it is way off topic except to say that much has been written about it.

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