Dolphin and Tabs?

Recently a patch was sent to the KDE file manager development list to implement tab functions in Dolphin. Following this patch a discussion about pro and cons of tabs in Dolphin has started.

Dolphin, the new easy-to-use default file manager of KDE 4 (in contrast to Konqueror, the power-user default file manager for KDE 4) was designed as a very lightweight and easy to use file manager without the rich feature and configuration set Konqueror has.
For most developers this included also to not have tabs.

Now the inclusion of tabs was proposed (full thread overview):

I have talked with several individuals some which say tabs should be allowed. Others are saying that tabs shouldn’t be allowed. I think the best compromise and solution to making everyone happy is to make a setting for tabs and by default the tab feature is disabled keeping dolphin simple.

But most developers rejected the idea due to different reasons:

Ouch, honestly it doesn’t look like a good idea to me. It’ll be yet another setting for a feature you can already have elsewhere. [...] That’s what we’ve done in the past, and why our userbase complains about the complexity of our settings dialogs.

Also, it was mentioned that Dolphin and Konqueror share many parts of the code base – and that Konqueror indeed supports tabs. From that point of view the better way would be to share more features of Dolphin with Konqueror.
But at least the current Konqueror version is missing quite some Dolphin tools and abilities.

However, Peter Penz made a good point:

So Dolphin aims for a different target audience and we must somewhere draw a line to stop adding features just for trying to make everybody happy. I admit that drawing this line is very difficult [...]

For him tabs are on the “power user” side of the line because tabs need a collection of configuration options (see Konqueror’s options for example).

An additional point of view could be provided by the usability experts maybe, but in the end it is simply a decision someone has to make – whether to include tabs or not.
I just hope, in case the tabs will not be included with Dolphin, that Konqueror integrates the nice stuff from Dolphin and stays the power user tool I’m used to and I really like to work with.

Further KDE release (cycle) discussions at aKademy

Voices from aKademy made clear that most KDE developers reject the idea of a 6 months release plan. But there were also discussions about the KDE 4 release schedule itself.

The idea of Mark Shuttleworth to create a fixed release schedule for KDE 4 were mainly refused by the developers at aKademy 4. There were too many concerns about possible disadvantages, but also some voices pointing out that KDE 4 should not be aligned to close to any single distribution.

In the meantime, some people discussed the KDE 4.0 release date. While they agreed on the 23rd October as the release date some proposed to make this release a kind of gamma release, followed by the real stable sometime later. The idea is to already ship a stable-enough version on 23rd of October which all distributions could pick up, but to have some additional time for bug fixing, translations and things like Plasmoids generation or kde-apps/kde-look preparation to have a really rock solid KDE 4 at the “official” release date. Also, the release team and the promotion team would have enough time preparing a real press event with a big release party.

Some people indeed liked the idea and discussed it further. Also some packagers of some distributions were pleased by that proposal. However, at the moment it is just an idea in the head of some people. So don’t get crazy about it because it might also be that the idea is dropped tomorrow without any further notice!
But I think the idea has some charm: it is important to have the network around KDE 4 ready when it is released. And part of the network is indeed to have a rich choice of KDE 4 styles, window decorations, icons and Plasmoids. Of course for early adopters packages would have to be ready in October, but there is no distribution I know of currently which will not provide such packages.

So all in all an interesting idea – but again, just an idea atm.