SEP
11
2005

Feedback

Submitted by krake

Free software development is all about feedback.
Feedback from other developers, non-coder contributors to the project,
your packagers and your users.

Sometimes you get very few feedback, which could either mean you are not
reaching anyone or everyone is so satisfied with the projects current state.

For my on sanity I assume the latter :)

One of my current projects, the KDE addressbook commandline client
kabcclient (also in SVN)
is generating very little feedback: only a handful comments on kde-apps.org,
no comments on its freshmeat page and only two people so far by email.

Speaking of the two guys who contacted me by email: I am pretty exited by that
because they are developers themselves and use kabcclient as part of their
applications.

For example as part of a SuperKaramba applet

The other project is not released yet, so I'll refrain from blogging about that until it is.

Now for some feedback from me:
KDE's translators rock. kabcclient was imported into SVN three days ago and the "pt" (Portugal if I'm not mistaken) translators have finished their
translation two days ago.
Busy like bees they are! :)

Comments

Not only users don't give decent feedback.
The apps usually don't offer an easy way to do this.
And guess what: even developers often don't seem to be interested in this topic.
Some time ago, I wrote a simple lib/app that can be easily integrated in other applications to give the user a simple tool to give feedback to developers.
I think I got three useful comments regarding this, I even got a mail from a guy who developed something similar, too.
I answered him once and never got a reply.

What should we do to improve the situation?
There are tools for developers available but they aren't used.
There is even no feedback from developers how to improve those tools!

Maybe you got interested in this, so you could take a look here:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=20360

By Christian Nitschkowski at Sun, 09/11/2005 - 20:51

Christian, as we talked before, my vote would be still to propose the tool for KDE4's kdebase or somewhere at this level, i.e. a companion to "KTip" and "submit a bug" and "dr. Konqi" dialogs; in the meantime adding this stuff here could help: http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+4+Goals

By Jarosław Staniek at Sun, 09/11/2005 - 21:03

Hi Jaroslaw!
I tried twice to write to kde-core-devel, but as I'm not in the list (and don't want to be) my posts have to be approved by the list's moderator.
I'm still waiting for the approval.
I'll write another mail, may be this time I'll have more luck with this.

By Christian Nitschkowski at Sun, 09/11/2005 - 21:18

yes, try it again - as there ARE users that really want to give feedback! its just that it can be difficult, and getting this into KDE-libs or some other easy-to-access place so it gets integrated in most/all KDE apps would be very handy. i'm sure some users will use it to give valuable feedback!

thanx for the work, i hope you can get it in KDE SVN asap.

By superstoned at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 12:12

It is already in SVN.
You can find it in the playground-module.

By Christian Nitschkowski at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 12:22

Unless the information on the kde-apps page is outdate, it might help to relicence it under LGPL

By krake at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 12:47

I ever thought apps I wrote using a GPL licensed Qt has to be GPL licensed, too.
I wouldn't mind to change the license to LGPL (which I prefer anyway) if I'm allowed to.

By Christian Nitschkowski at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 13:31

Most code in kdelibs is LGPL.
In fact to get into kdelibs the code has to be either licenced under LGPL, BSD or X11 (if I remember correctly, it is explained somewhere on developer.kde.org)

By krake at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 17:28

It also doesn't help your case that the download link returns a 404 error...

By sebr at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 00:34

My University's webserver was down at the weekend, sorry for that.

By krake at Mon, 09/12/2005 - 10:34