KDE version in Lenny: KDE 3.5.9 vs KDE 4.1

[Miriam Ruiz]

2008/6/6 Peter Eisentraut <peter_e at gmx.net>:

> Just take a look around any of the various bug lists for KDE, in Debian or
> upstream.  How many months or years of testing do you think it took to find
> these?  Considering that KDE 4 is pretty much new software, you should plan
> on spending that much testing time for it as well.  And I don't believe that
> time has already been spent, despite all the prereleasing and so on.  So in
> my mind the proposed plan to upload hitherto unreleased software in the last
> minute before the OS release is quite foolish.
>
> Keep in mind that KDE is going to be used by a lot of otherwise
> computer-illiterate users.  There are a lot of corporate and government users
> that are very conservative and need robust functionality and upgrade paths.
> Things like icons being misrendered, MIME types not being properly connected,
> the apparent requirement to mix some KDE 3 and 4 applications -- yes, all
> these things are probably fixable and can be tolerated by an experienced
> user.  But if KDE+Debian is supposed to be "The Linux Desktop", which it is
> well on its way to being, then these problems, which are numerious in KDE 4,
> should not be tolerated.

Hi,

With my user hat on, I totally agree with this. I've already asked
other KDE users too, and they also seem to agree that, while KDE4 will
be great in the future, it's not ready for a stable release yet. It
will be great to have it optionally available for those that want to
test it, and probably those will want to upgrade to 4.2 as soon as it
is out anyway, so they'll probably decide to go for backports soon.

I expect from Debian stable to be stable enough for a production
system, and to have a robust functionality. KDE4 might be cooler, but
I think KDE3 satisfies my needs better right now. Most of the people
(advanced users using different distributions) I've asked about it
seem to think the same. In fact, most of them have tried KDE 4.1 and
switched back to KDE 3 for their normal usage.

I guess most of the people expect real stability from a Debian stable
release. Remember when we released xfree instead of xorg because it
wasn't ready yet, even though the rest of the distros had already
released xorg? xfree was the most conservative and sensible option
then, even though xorg was fancier.

I think that Ana's proposal ("My proposal is release with "old"
reliable KDE 3.5.9 not forcing anyone to update to KDE 4.1, and just
provide 4.1.x "official" backports. So whose who want to use KDE 4.1
will just use the backports and besides") is quite sensible and
logical. I personally would prefer to be able to use KDE 3 for the
moment until KDE 4 is ready.

Greetings,
Miry