Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week

Wednesday, 25 April 2001  |  Dre

The KDE Project is planning to release kdelibs-2.1.2 early next week. The unscheduled release was prompted by the release today of KOffice 1.1beta1, which has problems with the kdelibs from KDE 2.1.1, as well as a security fix for kdesu, resulting from a security bug reported this week. However, the release will include a number of other bugfixes as well. Stay tuned.

Comments:

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - richie123 - 2001-04-25

I was hoping that they were going to do a 2.1.2 release, rather than simply charging ahead with 2.2 since there are a number of minor bugs in 2.1.1 that need fixing. So hopefully this release will adress a few anoying bugs with konqueror such as the "protocol: javascript not supported bug" and the "lost conection to host" bugs. Great to see Kde is looking out for it's users and moving toward building the most reliable desktop for Linux, as well as the most feature rich

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Timothy R. Butler - 2001-04-25

I sure hope they will include a kdebase 2.1.2 too... I'd be thrilled if I could upgrade from KDE 2.1 without living with the bugs that prevent applets from loading (at startup) on a child panel, and the bug that causes KDE to crash at startup when you enable anti-aliasing. -Tim

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Waldo Bastian - 2001-04-25

There will be no kdebase 2.1.2. Crashes with anti-aliasing are unlikely to be caused by KDE itself. See http://lists.kde.org/?t=98634011600003&w=2&r=1 Cheers, Waldo

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Timothy R. Butler - 2001-04-25

Hi Waldo, Thanks for the tip, it looks like dep has a good article on configuring anti-aliasing (referenced from the thread you referred me to) that might help me find the problem. Before I race off and switch to KDE 2.1.1 however, do you have any tips on how to fix my the problem with Kicker child panels and KDE 2.1.1? The problem seems to consist of, I add something to a child panel (say a clock or taskbar), restart KDE, and the child panel is empty. Thanks, Tim

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Johnny Andersson - 2001-04-25

Maybe it'll work if you close everything except your kicker plugins and chose "restore session when logging in next time" when logging out? (I did that to make KMix appear in Kicker at startup)

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Michael Driscoll - 2001-05-09

This has been fixed in 2.2, the problem was with the interaction of child panels and auto-hide.

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Ingolf Steinbach - 2001-04-26

Will there definitely be no kdebase 2.1.2? Even if bugs are found in 2.1.1 (and I am quite sure there will be some)? Even if users supply fixes for these bugs? I believe that I am not the only one which would like to have a KDE desktop which becomes more and more stable while staying compatible (for example with respect to configuration files). Unfortunately I do not have the time to upgrade to a completely new version of KDE every few months and to learn how to do this and that with the new version which was different with previous versions. Apart from that, as we all know, completely new versions usually introduce some new bugs... I understand that maintaining two branches of KDE (HEAD and 2.1 in this case) require some resources (manpower, hardware, ...). But do I really have to feel like an oldtimer if I want to use a given KDE version (including bug fixes) which was released half a year ago? Regards Ingolf

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Carbon - 2001-04-27

I'm afraid that, IMHO, it wouldn't be a good idea to have your cake and eat it too. Bugs are reported everywhere, and many of the bugs are actually not in kdebase and libs. Yes, new versions introduce new bugs, but minor-minor version updates, aka x.x.+1, are generaly designed to fix bugs. Just look at kde 2.1.1, and all the bugs fixed there. Also, frankly, i would imagine it's very difficult to fix bugs, especially UI consistency bugs, if you don't want there to be any changes in the look n feel. As for config files, almost every KDE update (except from the 1.x series to the 2.x series) has been capable of automatically adpating for changes in config files. For instance, konqueror automatically compensated for the format change in the bookmarks system. Updating kde is not hard, it's almost always a matter of downloading some RPMs or DEBs for the new versions of kde and qt, and just installing them.

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Rob - 2001-05-01

Your comment stating that you are quite sure there will be some bugs found lead me to believe that you have not yet encountered any bugs. That being the case, would you not agree that KDE 2.1.1 is already a very stable desktop and sufficient for your needs and hence KDE 2.1.2 is not necessary? Also, if you cannot upgrade regularly and if KDE 2.1.2 and KDE 2.2 were both available by the time you next decided to upgrade, would you really download and install KDE 2.1.2? KDE is the most stable desktop available and KDE 2.2 is an important evolution. The new Print and IMAP support are two major enhancements that do not deserve to wait any longer than necessary before being introduced. Also, it is my understanding that there will be few major core changes(the new Print mechanism is a simple drop in replacement for the old one and I expect it to be quite stable by release time). Features that were present in KDE 2.1.1 should therefore be as stable as they were in the previous release and any bugs associated with them should be cleared up. New features will always have bugs, so we will just have to live with them until the next release but they should not interfere with the operation of the program as it is today.

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Ingolf Steinbach - 2001-05-02

It's amazing how people succeed in not reading what I have and have not written. I did never say that KDE 2.1 is not pretty stable on x86. What I said is that it would be a pity to (IMHO) prematurely exclude another bug-fix release even if it might prove necessary. And even if there were already fixes for these bugs (see my original post). Without wanting to step on the developers' feet (who really do a great work!), but there is a well-known OS out there which we all love so desperately and which "does not have any bugs its users want to get fixed - and if you think you found a bug in version 98 of this OS, why don't you upgrade to version 2k?". And yes, I would not upgrade to 2.2 if there were 2.1.2 available as I would expect 2.1.2 to be more stable than 2.2. In case of KDE, I am a *user* rather than a developer and cannot spend hours on bug hunting. (And to anticipate some possible replies: I do contribute to free software projects and have contributed to KDE once or twice.) BTW, there are companies which cannot switch easily to new versions of software they use (be it commercial or non-commercial software) without a significant amount of management activities while installing patches or bugfix-releases is permitted and much easier. I have not yet located any bugs in KDE 2.1(.1), but I have had some strange behaviour on non-x86 platforms (sparc and m68k) which might be caused by bugs in KDE (these could be for example endianness issues). I don't know when I will have the time to investigate this further. IMNSHO, software which is "bugfree by definition" is rather user unfriendly (see the other OS). As I am not an active KDE developer I cannot (and don't want to) blame anyone for not fixing bugs. But as a user of the software I hope that I will not be left out in the rain if I do not want more features but just bug fixes incorporated in a release which is say a year old. Regards Ingolf

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Gunter Ohrner - 2001-04-25

I, too, think that a KDE 2.1.2 or 2.1.3 release would be nice as there are quite a few minor but nevertheless annoying bugs in KDE 2.1.1 and KDE 2.2 is still some way ahead and will probably introduce some new bugs. A rock-solid desktop environment for production use would be nice and KDE 2.1.1 - isn't although it's great, of course.

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Patrick Werner - 2001-04-26

Hey, test KDE 2.2 alpha 1! There are many bugfixes added, including the problem with the Newsticker! Only KMail 1.2.1 is very unstable on my computer. But this is the only thing because of which you can call it an alpha release! And IMHO I think that things like the new printing framework, the IMAP support in kmail and the IPv6 support are required features of a desktop environment for enterprise use!

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Gunter Ohrner - 2001-04-26

I did test KDE 2.2alpha1 but only as I'm more interested in experimenting with software than using stable releases... <g> If I'm using KDE for real work I use KDE 2.1.1 and I must say that it's still too buggy. As I already mentioned KDE2 is a great desktop environment (else I would not be using it) but I fear that the developers are more on a feature hunt than hunting bugs. (That's easily understanable to anyone who ever had to debug software, of course. ;-) IMHO a missing feature is less critical than a buggy feature if you're trying to use software to get your work done instead of using it just to try it out or play with it. I, in the meantime, do my best to help the developers to catch the bugs by reporting any I can find - more would be beyond my limited time and knowledge. :-(

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Tima Vaisburd - 2001-04-27

Hi! I think a bugfix release of kdelibs is a very good idea and I completely agree that if you are interesting in "getting your work done" or writing some programs for KDE instead of developing core KDE components themselves, you need these bugfix releases. IMHO it would be a good idea to have stable and development branches, like e.g. Linux kernel does. Why KDE team did not adopt this practice? Keep up the good work, Tima.

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Catalin Climov - 2001-04-26

Tim, I posted a fix to the child panel issue soon after 2.1.1 was released. Check the kde-devel archives, no patch included (the fix is a one-liner).

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Timothy R. Butler - 2001-04-26

Hi Catalin, Thanks for the tip! I'll go check it out. -Tim

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Timothy R. Butler - 2001-04-28

Hi Catalin, I tried the patch, and after compiling a few libs from around KDEBASE I was able to successfully get the child panel extention to install on top of my RPM-based install of KDE 2.1.1. Thanks so much for your help! -Tim

need to re-compile KDE 2.1.1 with new kdelibs ??? - Malte - 2001-04-30

Is it enough just to upgrade kdelibs to 2.1.2 or has kdebase and the rest of KDE 2.1.1 to be re-compiled against kdelibs 2.1.2 ? Malte

Re: Release of kdelibs 2.1.2 Planned Next Week - Mateo - 2001-04-30

With limited resources, I'm glad the KDE team is pushing towards more complete functionality over bugless but featureless software. Once they've got this surge of functionality out of the way, than I think they should stabilize things more.