| KDE publishes v4.0 roll-out schedule |
Mar. 21, 2007
 On March 21, KDE e.V, the non-profit organization behind the popular KDE desktop environment, announced its schedule to complete its next version, 4.0. If all goes well, we should see a release of KDE 4.0 this Fall.
While the group's timeline is subject to change, the project announced "we will try our best to stick to them if possible. The KDE Release Team is acting as the coordinator for the 4.0 release."
The new KDE will have many changes ranging from the minor, such as art improvements, to the major, such as KOffice 2.0. If you could sum them up in one word, though, that word would be "consistency." For example, the new multimedia API (application programming interface), Phonon, is designed to provide a single API for KDE 4 multimedia applications regardless of the underlying operating system or audio engines. By providing common sets of APIs, it will be easier to port applications to the KDE environment.
As the schedule stands now, on April 1, all KDE subsystems will be frozen. Then, on May 1, KDE will release the first Alpha in source-code only format. At the same time, the kdelibs API will be "soft-frozen." By this the developers mean that changes can be made to this cross-platform library, but only with the consent of the core developers.
On June 1, the KDE trunk code feature list will be frozen. Simultaneously, a list of main modules that will be included in the final release will be announced. This will be followed by the release of KDE 4.0 beta 1 on June 25.
Next will come the release of beta 2 on July 2, and beta 3 on Aug. 25. On Sep. 23, KDE goes into a total release freeze. From there on, only regressions, breakage caused by the KDE4 port, or grave bugs can be fixed.
Moving in to the finish, KDE will release KDE 4 .0 Release Candidate 1 on Sep. 25, followed quickly by Release Candidate 2 on Oct. 9. Presuming that no show-stopper bugs appear in these close-to-final test releases, KDE 4.0 will appear on Oct. 23, 2007.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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