My, but there have been a lot of reflective good-old-days posts in the past few days. Mostly due to broken blog software, but I think it’s wonderful to sometime have our old views or concerns thrust to the forefront again. It started with Ben Meyer’s comparison between KDE3 and MacOSX - it wasn’t particularly obvious that it was an old article except for the wonky screenshots and here and there. Some of the critiques still make sense, and some triggered a “what? has he been paying attention at all lately?” response from me, and the same applied to many commenters.

Jos Poortvliet has just relived the KDE4 release event and the alligator incident. Ahh, good times, as Paul Adams and I still frequently reminisce about that event. Paul’s work on visualizing our history and activity inside KDE is exciting and reminds us of when we had collective crunch times and when we had everyone travelling (we’ve done this kind of study on various KDE SVN modules).

It is often said that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. By looking again at the plans we had then and the aspirations and the technical goals we can evaluate: are we on course? What have we not achieved since then? It’s something every KDE subproject could do for a bit of end-of-year reflection, while avoiding the crushing depression of “we didn’t make it” if the original goals weren’t reached.

One reason I’m thinking of these issues is because the KDE4-Solaris project didn’t make it into OpenSolaris 2008.11, and I spent some time re-planning and re-scheduling to make clear what we did do and what needs to be completed in order to reach our original goals – or in this case, to get KDE4 into OpenSolaris 2009.4 as something you can just install through the packaging system; pkg install kde4 ought to be enough then. Those evaluations go onto the KDE4-Solaris mailing list, though, not into this blog.

Congratulations to Amarok, for reaching their goal. Also for pulling a “KDE 4.0” (suggested definition: releasing a .0 of a major revision of a software project with reduced functionality along with clear communication that that functionality is missing, that it’s planned for a minor revision later and not having that communication entirely picked up by the early adopters). It is at the top of my list of next-applications-to-add-to-the-OSOL-packages.