Eating the dogfood

Who invented the phrase 'eat your own dogfood' - it's so much fun to say! Although the idea of taking it literally is gross for some reason...

Overnight, Ars published a review of mine that corresponds roughly to Beta 2 (I checked out the sources about 24 hours after beta 2 was tagged). Ever since I built that specific version last week, I've been living in KDE 4 full time. And you know, it hasn't even been that bad.

I've found a couple of bugs in my so-called day-to-day tasks that I'll bring up here just to give everyone and idea of the severity of the problems remaining.

Okular had a little zooming problem. I even fixed that bug with a one-line, whee!. The simple bugs I can handle, but not everything is that simple.
KSnapshot takes shots of static when composite is off, and when it's on, it only gets parts of windows.
When I use Konq and I enter an https address, nothing happens when I press enter.... but the https ioslave does work as I can log into other https-enabled websites by following links. Weird bug, but I think it's a bug in the address bar.
Composite is quite slow - I have a supported card, but I only get two or three frames when the minimize animation happens - so not really smooth yet. I'm not sure if it's a problem with kwin or my X though.
The contrast in the Oxygen style is a bit low making things slow for me to interpret visually, but I'm sure the Oxygen team is well aware of whatever problems still exist.
I get repainting problems when scrolling up (but not down) - this happens with or without the Oxygen theme, so that is not the cause of this problem.
I get an error message when starting Dolphin about Nepomuk - a pretty wordy error... unfortunately the error message doesn't tell me how to start the Nepomuk services so I've been left scratching my head...
I originally got crashes when programs were closing - that's since been fixed (thank you to whoever did that!)
Noatun gladly opens video files (I presume this it thanks to phonon), but I don't get a video window. This could be related to an older version of libxine perhaps as the stable kubuntu doesn't have packages for the required bit-release.
There seems to be some sort of glitch in the automatic resizing of the taskbar buttons where sometimes they don't shrink after the window title gets shorter.

As you can see, the nature of the problems I am facing are mostly of the bug variety. Some of which might be considered show-stoppers. In reality, I've been using a full session of KDE 4 for 5 days now, rebuilding periodically, and with the except of bugs and inconveniences (which are shrinking with each rebuild), I really do think it's time for the whole KDE development group to "eat their own dogfood" if they really want to see the shine put on this release. Who knows, maybe if we do enough bug fixing early, we won't need two release candidates and we'll be out before December.

Most of you are far superior coders than I am, so I only do what I can. Anyway, I'd just like to say a big thank you to everyone that has been working hard on this release. It's nice to see things really starting to come together.

Cheers folks