I am proud to report that Kubuntu 11.10 now has KDE SC 4.7rc.

Over the last couple of weeks the better part of the Kubuntu team has been pulling all nighters to bring the greatness of KDE SC 4.7 to Kubuntu.

It was quite an initial effort to get packages ready due to some architectural changes with regards to distribution of sources (I suppose I should write about that at some point ;)). But now that we have almost all of them ready for 11.10 we will be able to bring you release packages of 4.7.0 in the best quality possible for both 11.10 and 11.04.

On a related note KDE SC 4.7.0 is supposed to be available on July 27.

Of course we would not be in that good a position for the 4.7.0 release without the excellent team of Kubuntu Ninjas, the elite release packagers working in the dungeon of our IRC channel.

Together they prepared 130 source packages for upload, 57 of those were new to the Kubuntu archive and therefore required special attention. Additionally 6 new scripts were created to help manage the increased amount of packages.

A big thank you goes to:

Romain Perier – french reinforcement for the ninjas, though he is becoming a knight who says ni at the court of Phonon (or so someone told me)

Rohan Garg – the ever so fearless licensing specialist and he is the one responsible for Kate still being broken (in case you were wondering)

Michał Zając – apparently he won in the lottery and went on a skateboarding trip through Poland, he has not been the same ever since

Philip Muškovac – not much of a blogger but otherwise a nice enough chap, also he coordinated the whole effort and might become Kubuntu developer some time soon (no idea what latter entails, but it sure sounds cool)

Felix Geyer – I believe he is living in a data center as he uploaded half the packages in less than a day, also he came up with a build status overview web page (I guess that supports my theory?)

Scott Kitterman – the man who actually gets new stuff into the archive, or not, depending on whether he gets enough cookies, sometimes proper licensing also helps

Myself – the grumpy upstream developer who gets annoyed from not having packages 😛

Greetings from your friendly Kubuntu crew 🙂