Okay Ruurd, I'm going to play your game, out in the open and in public, since the planets seem to be the place to play games these days (see planet.gnome.org for a good example of a similar game, complete with personal attacks and other niceties we usually try to avoid).
First, let me clear up the disclaimer on my part: I do KDE marketing, by writing articles, going to the odd event, planning a release party and more. But before all of that, I am first and foremost a very long term KDE user and developer (although I generally do more using than developing). That said, from a marketing standpoint, I'm not happy with 4.0 yet. From a beta-testing standpoint, and knowing where the future lies, I'm ecstatic.
With that in mind, it is my understanding that you are a little upset about the current state of plasma. Sure your original post was tactful enough when talking about the status of various KDE applications , but you were definitely less than polite when it comes to your opinion on the state of plasma and its usefulness.
Fortunately for you, Canucks like Aaron (or myself) are usually pretty polite when dealing with criticism. We're used to taking a gentle ribbing (See South Park for reference), and generally seem to put up with most of the crap people throw our way. Now, however, if the insults get a little too close to home, we're liable to pull people's shirts over their heads and start wailing on them. Fortunately Aaron is a continent away from you otherwise I'm pretty sure that's what he would have done, and I don't blame him. You see, not more than a few days ago, he posted an entry that (while sounding a little like whining) requested that people provide constructive solutions in their blog entries rather than simply making "complaints lists". A short time later, he comes back to read a rather critical blog entry that does exactly what he was suggesting shouldn't happen, and its principal target is his main project. Ouch. I mean, if you don't like Aaron, or are not happy with his status within KDE's e.V. or similar, you should talk about that directly. Otherwise constructive feedback would be infinitely more useful.
Now that said, Aaron can be a little, shall we say, "passionate" at times. Sometimes he needs to take a chill pill and worry about his code rather than what people say on the planet :). Yes, this is the code that allows your so-called "New features. Shiny objects." but it also is a replacement architecture for kicker and related toys of which Aaron was already the maintainer. He saw that there were things that could be improved moving forward, and while the development progress was slow in the beginning, the future-proofing of plasma will be worthwhile. And it's not like all of that code was thrown out anyway - many of the classes and methods were simply copied over, such as the task management code from kicker, or the screen locking code from kdesktop.
And besides, it's not like he had to mud-wrestle the existing maintainer to make the decision to dump the old code! He was the bloody kicker maintainer!
"Give me the old one anytime..." So, if you would like to port kicker and kdesktop to KDE 4 and put them in the playground or some similar branch, and maintain them (they are now without a maintainer), so that you can use them in 4.0 instead of your "Useless plasma", please feel free. Or you can stop pretending you are even remotely associated with the KDE 4.0 development process and shut the hell up! Trying one pre-release of KDE 4 and labeling it a failure without having seen previous builds makes you no better than the users that complain in the dot comments - only you happen to have a slightly better soapbox. Rather than just telling us that it has been a waste of time to develop KDE 4's technologies, explain your specific needs or, better yet, help maintain the 3.5.x branch for the time being between the time that 4.0 is released and it reaches feature-parity and stability that matches 3.5.x.
That said, I do think that your concern stems from the release-team making a mistake by calling things a release-candidate this early as things are obviously still a few steps away from releasable. This is something that cannot be changed retroactively, but can be considered a lesson-learned for future releases. This is the first KDE release that has been managed by a release-team, and personally, I think we were better off with a single release dude since there was less hesitation during decision making processes. Ruurd, if it makes you feel any better to think of what you tested as a mis-named beta release rather than a release-candidate, then please do so.
By the way, if anyone is interested in rebuilding KDE 4, you'll find plasma is getting more and more useful over time. It still doesn't have all the functionality of kicker in 3.5.x, but it works well enough. I didn't think it was ever supposed to be 1-for-1 feature replication anyway.
Cheers folks, and lets all have us a good Krush day this Saturday to help track down a few of the remaining inconveniences.
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