measuring time in commits

i was very tempted to do some plasma screencasts and finish off that blog draft about why ~/Desktop-centric desktops are poor ideas and .. but i need to focus on next week's event and finish off my presentation for it.

tomorrow the 11th (it's still the 10th here) is theoretically release day for 4.0. i'll be waiting for announcement to appear in the wee hours of the morning here before raising a glass of fine scotch in a quiet toast in the solitude of my living room to all those fine people who have made this a reality.

i could go on about the many release events that are set to happen in the next two weeks all around the world (San Francisco, Mumbai, Berlin, Hamburg, Toulouse, etc ...) but i'm sure we'll hear lots about those. in fact, several bloggers on planetkde have been talking about this.

alternatively, i could go on about the 4.0 release itself, but i think we'll get plenty of that over the next week.

so i thought i'd do something a bit ... anti-climactic and talk about what we've doing since 4.0 was tagged on the fourth day of january, nearly a week ago now.

those observing from the outside might have thought that we'd all go off, breath heavy sighs of relief and let the feeling seep back into our weary fingers. nope. we're KDE and we're here for one reason: to create, to hack, to draw, to document, to translate, to study, refine and improve. it's a constant effort; yes, it's an effort, but it's constant because we enjoy it and so in some sense ... it is effortless.

so what have we been up to? 2067 commits since the end of the tagging day. there were some commits at the end of tagging day that apply to post-4.0, but i don't have solid numbers there. i also haven't looked into how many were in the 4.0 branch versus the 4.1 branch. but after i mentioned this number twice today, once to a friend asking how things were going (hi Marcel =) and once to Will "Bille" Stephenson as he was working on the reviewer's guide, i figured maybe others might be interested in that number too. 344 commits a day since 4.0.

obviously you can't measure the progress of a project purely in terms of commit numbers; they are a bit too abstract to draw definitive conclusions from. but just like frogs in the swamp, they are a good indicator of the health of things and as you can see there are a lot of frogs chirping in our waters these days.

as someone who perpetually lives in the near future of kde by running svn builds as his primary desktops, i love this. i get to see the desktop and applications blossom right before me. it's so ... cool. 4.0.1 is going to be a rather nice release, 4.1 is going to be killer.

oh, and in that same time we've been: discussing the release schedule for 4.1 and how we will set the pace for 4.x releases in general; writing a lot of communication bits for the 4.0 release; arranging all those parties i mentioned earlier; writing presentations for the release events; arranging meetings with all sorts of interesting industry types at the release events; working on 4.1 plans ... all while smashing bugs, committing the next round of features, chatting on irc and ensuring we all get enough food, sleep and socialization to not become complete kzombies in the process. ;)

... and 4.0 isn't being officially released until tomorrow. that is the part that kills me. less than a week ago and it already seems ages have past. it was 2067 revisions ago, after all. ;)