Alpha software and 9.10

[Jonathan Thomas]

Hello,

It has come to my attention that two pieces of software that we had assumed 
would have stable releases by now have now. We need to decide what the best 
decision would be to handle this situation.

Kaffiene, which has replaced Dragon Player as the default media player, is 
currently at  1.0 prerelease 1. A second pre-release has been released by 
Kaffeine (and needs sponsorship if a core-dev feels generous) but is still 
very much an alpha. It should be said that there is a not-uncommon startup-
crasher that Kaffeine currently has[1]. Dragon Player, by contrast, is much 
more stable and has complete KDE support for bug fixes. I cannot advocate the 
default inclusion of Kaffeine in the state it's currently in.

K3b I'm a bit less dead-set about. Currently it is at 1.66 (alpha 2 of 2.0 I 
guess) and from what I and a few others have seen, burns things quite fine. 
There have been a few crash reports against the KDE4 version[2] (I count 4) 
Upstream also seems to have died after alpha 2 was released, which was almost 
4 months ago[3]. Do we want to revert to a KDE3 version? Harald Sitter and I 
agreed that polling our userbase in regards to this would be a good idea, but 
we also both lamented that we don't really have a good way to go about this...


Anyway, in my opinion Kaffeine should at the least not be part of the default 
installation. I'm still thinking about my opinion on K3b, but if we want to 
take care of this at all, we really need to do so soon.

Take care,
Jonathan Thomas, your emergency backup Jonathan.

[1] https://launchpad.net/bugs/422183
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/k3b/
[3] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/k3b/1.66.0~alpha2-0ubuntu1