Hello everyone. So we booked the hotel in Porto over the weekend for Tokamak II. No turning back now! The Big Topics will all turn around what we doing for 4.3 and beyond. So now is a good time to start thinking about that .. why?
Because, if you somehow managed to miss the news, 4.2 RC1 was tagged and a 4.2
branch made. That means trunk is now open for 4.3.
First, I'd like to both thank and congratulate everyone who contributed to
Plasma in KDE 4.2. It is a quantum jump up from 4.1 and the sky is the limit
from here. We managed to get a huge number of goals set out right at the
beginning of Plasma completed, things like extenders and unified reporting of
events.
libplasma made it into kdelibs, and the Plasma desktop shell looks better than
anything the KDE project has *ever* released.
Right now, we hae 196 outstanding defect reports on bugs.kde.org, beating our
goal of 200 by 4. This was a long, hard battle down from 450 through 2 betas
and a metric tonne (or three) of new lines of code.
It has been an awesome dev cycle. Each of us should be very proud and
satisfied with what we've done with the last 6 months.
Thank you all, for that.
With the release coming out, we'll probably face a bunch of new bug reports
and when we close bugs we should backport them. The svnbackport script in
kdesdk makes this easy to do.
Also remember that libplasma must now maintain binary compatibility. More than
anything else in libplasma, I'll be watching all commits that touch headers to
ensure that we stay on track. I'd appreciate it if you watched as well.
Cookies for anyone who catches me screwing up. ;)
But the real fun, of course, is 4.3. What are we going to work on? What will
we do?
Well, there's obviously stuff in 4.2 that can use polishing and work and
there's always the enjoyable business of making things prettier and faster.
I would personally like to see us concentrate in 4.3 on *making things* with
the framework we have errected here. We've spent the last year on a kick ass
framework, let's spend 2009 blowing people's minds with what you can build
with it.
For 4.3 I'm going to focus on community, sociability and media.
No, I'm not focussing on things other than Plasma! I mean I want to focus on
making Plasma something that keeps you in touch with the KDE community and
your own communities. Something that helps, rather than gets in the way, of
you being social. Something that encourages the use of media more pervasively
and more enjoyably.
For me, this means a number of projects I'll be starting:
* The Make A Widget Foundation (not sure if that's funny anywhere else but
North America): make every myspacer able to make and share widgets!
* The Plasma Design Studio; I've been working on design concepts since
Akademy around this and have some, imo anyways, pretty decent ideas on how to
do it
* Improving the Basic JavaScript engine more and more
* Implementing that security framework!
* Plasma Meets World: this is the JOLIE work that must finally make it into
libplasma so that people can discover a new level of interoperability and
power with their computers, and so Fabricio doesn't hang me by my toes ;)
* Media Center: This is the one I'm least sure about ... but ... something to
discuss at Tokamak for sure.
of course, there are more mundane things i'll also be plonking on, like:
* bugfixing (*sigh*)
* adding generic layout strategy support to Containments (something that makes
it possible to create and re-use layouts like the ones we've done for the
desktop or the panel in new containments)
* context menu plugins
* further work on per-desktop views
* revisit the zooming system and refine, refine
* cashew-pops-up-dashboard?
* Plasma::Message for plasmoids to show messages in a generic but pretty
fashion to the user, e.g. the folderview saying "can't reach the network"
* Plasma::Colors: rethinking colour schemes in plasma
* new applet browser window
* SolidDevice engine needs a Service
i'm not hellbent on being The One to do all of the above, of course ;) if
you're interested, i'm happy to help or just hand it on over.
But definitely start putting on your thinking caps ... it's feature season
again! Woo!
Oh, and if you have a component that is ready to go in 4.3, you can start
merging things into trunk.
... btw ... I think that if we just keep doing what we've been doing and keep
having fun at it, we're going to BLOW MINDS with 4.3. =)
Hugs ...
--
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software
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