The first Release Candidate of KDE 4.0 has been released today \o/. The most important and interesting packages are already available from experimental. If you want to try them, point your sources.list to experimental and install kdelibs5 kdepimlibs5 kdebase kdebase-workspace kdebase-runtime extragear-plasma kdegames kdeutils kdegraphics kdeedu. While I write these lines, kdebase-workspace and kdebase-runtime are stuck at NEW, so you can fetch them (actually, all the packages), adding to your sources:

deb http://people.debian.org/~ana/rc1/ ./.

These packages are not co-installable with current KDE 3.5.8, so if you want to test them, do not use your production environment and use instead qemu or virtualbox-ose. Even if the release is named RC1, this is not yet a fully usable desktop, but you have as well the possibility installing KDE4 apps on a your KDE3, i.e. try okular :)

If you are lazy, or not in hurry, you can wait a few days until the Debian KDE4 Beta4 Live is ready!

Finally, please, do not report bugs against KDE4 in the BTS yet, if you find bugs on KDE itself, report them to directly to upstream in the KDE bugzilla, and optionally you can note down it in this wiki page.

In Debian we all love statistics. It is not unusual see people blogging with graphs and stats about several stuff (ie: bugs, active developers), and we have official sites like popcon or this unofficial website bugstats that measures our packaging "karma". Now there is a page in the wiki http://wiki.debian.org/Statistics where put all the related links.

But I still keep thinking there are some more statistics we could gather, like daily number of the packages in the archive, top bugs reporters, monthly number of maintainers, etc. Some numbers would be interesting to see the "health" of the project, and some just for fun.

So, what about create stats.debian.net? The goal would be list statistics places and host different stats. Some of the existing sites could chose move there, and collaborately, people could submit their scripts.

The first version of the KDE4 desktop series, KDE 4.0 is planned to be release in December, 11th 2007 and our releases managers are aiming to release Lenny in September. Given that there are some months between releases, this seem to lead a lot of people to think Lenny will be released with KDE4, but this is highly improbable. It is true that KDE 4.0 could be delayed again, and almost everybody is expecting Lenny be delayed... :)

The development of KDE4 started more than 2 years ago, and actually the libraries seems to be in a pretty good shape, the next release of the KDE Development Platform is a proof of that, a lot of stuff that is what the end user actually see, like plasma, needs still some work. A lot of improvements that we are hoping see in our desktop won't be until KDE 4.1 or even 4.2. So the first release of the KDE4 desktop series will be still work in progress in some aspects and not so functional like current KDE 3.5 is.

On the other hand, KDE 3.5 is a pretty mature desktop that has been developed and tested for almost 2 years now, the 8th revision, KDE 3.5.8, was released in the beginning of this week, and we'll likely have a KDE 3.5.9 revision with more bugfixes. Also there are plans to merge the kdepim enterprise branch into the current 3.5 kdepim branch, so we'll be getting soon a bunch of bugfixes in kdepim, that have the dubious honour in being the second KDE module in Debian with more bugs after kdelibs.

So even if KDE 4.0 is released in december and lenny is delayed, there is not enough time to push KDE 4.0 or even 4.1, into a Debian stable release.