A few reminders

Hey guys, just a few reminders of some upcoming KDE-related deadlines.

KDE 4.0.0 final will be tagged on January 4th, unless something suddenly happens to change the minds of the release team.

For those of you still working on KDE 4.0.0, please note that any translations that come in after tagging will not be part of the official release, although distros may indeed pull the translations directly from SVN rather than the tarballs anyway, so while it'd be nice to get as many translations in by January 4th, don't let that deadline stop you from working later in the month :)

The release team is requesting that people check their i18n strings using krazy2 on EBN -- you can check the status of your module by visiting http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/krazy and choosing your module from the list. It will show a bunch of issues that have been automatically detected in the code -- look for the section that is labelled: "Check validity of i18n calls..."

There are a bunch of other checks going on as part of EBN, so please remember to look through them.

While you're at it, remember to add yourself to the wiki page on code re-licensing if you've contributed code to any of the problem modules (anything that is GPL2-only, for example) - the page lives at http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/KDE_Relicensing.

As a side note, Techbase is having some mod_rewrite issues at the moment which breaks most incoming links. This problem is known, but as it is the holidays, it might be a short while before everything is running smoothly again. Fixing the urls is less important than fixing bugs in 4.0.0 right now folks :)

And lastly, for those that are concerned about the quality of the 4.0.0 release. Just remember that we are releasing only the first in a series of 4.x releases that will likely last for a decade. We don't have to get everything right on the first try, and in fact, there are problems with 4.0.0 not having feature parity with 3.5.8. Some are even calling for a delay to the release of 4.0, but release-party excuses notwithstanding, we really need to get something released so that users start to use the software. Some users are even claiming that we should delay on account of the fact that "open source software has a history of only having ultra-stable, ultra-complete releases", which is not true at all when you look at releases like Apache 2.0, Kernel 2.6.0, and more. These releases were only the first step in producing a long series of excellent software. I'm sure that if the kernel was only judged by kernel 2.6.0 forever, people would see it as a total failure -- luckily the releases didn't stop there. The same goes for 4.0.0. Guys, if you are calling for delays, please just let us release this so we can get back to hacking outside of freeze, lest we end up like e17 :P

Cheers folks, and I may be nagging you folks about the upcoming deadlines for the next weeks :)