KDE 4.1 feature plan and release schedule published, KDE 4.0.1 tagged

The full release plan and the feature plan for KDE 4.1 have been published, with the official release date July 29th, 2008. In the meantime, the first bugfix release of the new KDE, KDE 4.0.1, was tagged.

KDE 4.1 release plan and schedule

After the initial announcement to release KDE 4.1 in July this year there is now a full release plan available. According to the plan, the first important date will be the end of March: at March 31st, 2008, trunk will be closed for new features. The development of the already added (but just not ready) features will still be possible, even with binary incompatibility, but new features will have to wait for KDE 4.2 afterwards. The first real freeze will be at April 22nd, 2008: everything which is not basically ready until then has will not be included. After that the usual dance of Alphas, Betas and Release Candidates will begin, until KDE 4.1 final will hopefully be released at July 29th, 2008.

The current expected and planned features for that release are listed in Techbase under Release Goals, while the current status of these features is monitored at the Feature Plan page. These lists are not final yet, however they do resemble the already well known lists flying around the blogosphere.

The remaining question is which distributions will pick up this new release first: maybe OpenSuse 11.0 will ship it as a preliminary version with final updates shortly after the 11.0 release, but that was just mentioned with a big maybe. The other distributions which have releases in Fall 2008 (like Fedora which will have its 10th release at that point) will for sure include it – or maybe even the first bugfix version, 4.1.1. In any way, in Fall 2008 every larger Linux distribution will most likely ship KDE in a 4.1 version.
Also, since this is a big aim for the KDE 4.1 release, packages for two other “distributions” will be available: Windows and Mac OS X. I’m looking forward to equip my windows friends with Amarok, Akonadi-kmail/kontact and Dolphin (to replace Norton Commander).

KDE 4.0.1 tagged

In the meantime, the first bugfix release for the KDE 4 series was tagged: KDE 4.0.1. The changelog for this version can be seen in an XML file (or at this web page), and the multitude of entries shows that the developers were indeed working quite hard. Since these are only bugfixed and are not supposed to brake anything or to introduce new features it can be expeceted that the distributions will ship this update pretty soon.