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I have tried to find the difference between the release policies adopted by KDE developers for major releases (e.g. 3.5 -> 4.0), major point releases (e.g. 4.3 -> 4.4) and minor point releases (e.g. 4.4.1 -> 4.4.2). The only documentation I have found is a draft of the minor point release policy. At the time of writing, this documentation contains:

"As stable releases these are recommended to a wide user base who expect a high degree of stability. Changes should therefore be verifiable, reliable, regression free [...]."

I guess that the majority of KDE users expects the same criteria to be included in the release policy for major point releases. However, by looking at what happened lately with the KDE SC 4.4 release, I guess that KDE developers adopt different criteria.

We can consider KAddressBook as a case study. KDE SC 4.4 shipped a new version of KAddressBook rewritten from scratch and based on Akonadi. Unfortunately, the new version introduced several regressions compared to the previous version shipped with KDE SC 4.3. This is reflected by the number of bug reports connected to the new version of KAddressBook:

221915
222677
222678
222690
233078
233093
233095
233097
234080

Indeed, the main author of the new version, Tobias Koenig, wrote on his blog:

"[...] don't expect the current KAddressBook to be as feature rich as its previous version."

Kubuntu 10.4 LTS has been released with KDE SC 4.4.2 which contains the new, feature incomplete version of KAddressBook. Kubuntu packagers neglected to provide the old KAdressBook in Kubuntu 10.4 since it would have been infeasible. Moreover, KDE developers neglect to backport the current trunk of KAddressBook into KDE SC 4.4.3 since minor point releases are not supposed to add features (ironically, the same features that were actually removed with the KDE SC 4.4.0 release). In this scenario, unless KDE developers change their minds, Kubuntu LTS-only users will be probably stuck with a feature incomplete version of KAddressBook until Kubuntu 12.4. I do find this acceptable and I do not think that the distributor can be blamed for this problem.

I suggest KDE developers to adopt a release policy for major point releases that avoids breaking existing functionality.

I really appreciate the efforts KDE developers are spending to provide this cutting-edge desktop. However, the KDE community have seen a lot of users jumping off the train with the questionable KDE SC 4.0 release and it would be a pity to experience the same once again because of the current release policies.

Best regards.