New Release Schedule

The KDE Release Team has worked on a revised release schedule during the last week, and now it's a fact. While a first version of the renewed schedule had already made it on the development lists there were still some problems open with it. If you'd pick the worst week of the whole year, it would be around 20 December, which was the release date in the previous version of the revised schedule. We've now shifted the release date of KDE 4.0 to December 11th. Tagging of this release will take place on 5 December.

The new thing in the release schedule is not the slightly earlier date, but it's the overall strategy has changed. Just like KDE is becoming more and more a meta-project, there is also an ongoing discussion what KDE is anyway. It's a community of Free Culture people, a Desktop Environment (a term that noone outside the geek world understands) and a development platform. And that's what we're releasing. So here's how it looks like in the new world order. First, the Desktop:

• October, 2nd: KDE 4.0 Beta 3
• October, 19th: Total Release Freeze
• October, 30th: KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 1
• November, 14th: KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 2
• December, 11th: KDE 4.0

Since a releasable desktop builds on libraries and tools that are sufficiently stable, and since we feel very good about the current state of kdelibs and everything that is a bit further down the stack, we'll be releasing a KDE Developer Platform already at the end of October, together with the first release candidate. This developer platform (sort of an SDK) contains libraries and tools to build and run KDE applications (but no applications themselves). By doing this, we want to make it easier for third party developers and 'casual developers' (those who don't have time compiling kdelibs and the other needed bits) to work on KDE 4.0 applications and port existing applications to KDE 4.0. This is all part of a grand master plan which is all about making KDE development easier and more fun. This effort is of course spearheaded by Techbase, our portal to all the knowledge about KDE software and development. Techbase has in very short time become an invaluable tool for the whole community and lower the barrier to enter KDE development.

Enough rambling, here's the deal: KDE 4.0 is now planned to be released on December 11th. The KDE Development Platform will be given birth (yeah, it really is our baby!) on October 30th. The Development Platform contains kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase/runtime.

[ Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:34:27 +0200 ] permanent link

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