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Re: wow
by Antonio on Thursday 01/May/2008, @06:43

> Wow, are you kidding? I heard it practically daily in the run-up to KDE 4.0
> when everybody was complaining about it being unstable. It was the standard
> excuse for why 4.0 was so buggy.

As others have pointed out, I would appreciate your telling me where you saw that. People were promising that 4.1 would be _better_, yes. People were saying it would have fewer bugs, because it would have been more tested, as I pointed out in my own post, something which you utterly disregarded. There is a massive difference between `yes, there will be fewer bugs' and `our focus will be stabilization rather than new features'. The former is normal for major releases, the latter is not. Stabilization is for bug-fix releases. The 4.0.3s of the world, which have shone in that regard.

> Correction: 3.5.9 is as stable as it is because it has had 6 years of
> development *that wasn't focused on major re-architecting*.

And it had the luxury of not focusing on major re-architecting because it built on the major re-architecting in KDE 2, which introduced features (KParts and KIO, for example) that other environments (Windows and such included) *still* don't have.

> Just the mere act of development doesn't make software more stable. It
> depends what *kind* of development it is. Some can make it more stable. Some
> can make it less so.

Which... Was exactly what I said. Thank you for reiterating.

> The post-4.0.x work that has gone into Plasma so far is the latter.

Well, for one thing it wasn't post-4.0.x, it was parallel-to-4.0.x. Which is important because bug fixes were made along the way. Yes, this new API has obviously re-broken some things, but the point, as, again, has been pointed out elsewhere, is that the API is hopefully going to go into long-term maintenance mode, and, by affiliation, the underlying stuff will not be *able* to be revised for five years or so.

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Official News
·   Also by Antonio
·   Contact author

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Re: wow
by Stefan Majewsky on Saturday 03/May/2008, @10:27

> it [KDE 3.5.9] had the luxury of not focusing on major re-architecting because it built on the major re-architecting in KDE 2, which introduced features (KParts and KIO, for example) that other environments (Windows and such included) *still* don't have.

Perhaps the point is that we do not have many developers (esp. when compared to M$ and Apple) and thus have to implement things in a very effective way. Many key components of KDE (such as the mentioned KParts and KIO libs) and the underlying Qt libraries allow applications to implement features with less code (and therefore less possible error causes).

Some examples from my personal impressions: To open a website in the user's favorite browser, the code is one line (KRun::runUrl()). Downloading a file from an arbitrary location (from local files to web services to SSH resources) costs three lines of code (KIO::NetAccess::download() to temporary file + error check + cleanup temporary files). Under Windows, access to files at arbitrary locations requires you to essentially write a new API for your program which links against several libraries.

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