[calligra] /: Qt3Support is also needed in Calligra.

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 2 December 2011 14:53, Markus Slopianka <markus.s at kdemail.net> wrote:
> On Freitag 02 Dezember 2011 11:25:33 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>
>> We don't know how the KDE 5 will be deployed so would we have a
>> transitional Calligra/Qt5 running on KDE/Qt4 before KDE/Qt5 arrives?
>
> There won't ever be a "KDE 5" because "KDE" is not the name of software.
> KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) will be released in summer as part of the regular 6-months cycle
> (replacing current KDE Platform 4.x) and Plasma Workspaces 4.9 (KPW) will depend on KF5.
> That's the current plan, anyway.

Qt 5 is BIC with Qt 4. It'll be highly SC. What that means? Two copies
of Qt in OSes, two copies of KDElibs too for the transitional period.
Please note I am only referring to deployment not release. Release is
20% of the effort for me.
I'd like to see plans for backporting KDE 5 modules to currently used
distros, let's say, all lines of Ubuntu 10.x.

>> KDE/Qt5  will appear on real desktops after most applications are
>> ported. Will this year or more? No idea. No doubt distros would wait
>> for that and won't be trying to repeat the KDE 4.0 story again.
>
> You seem totally disconnected from core development and seem to fill in the gaps in your
> information with guessing (I suggest subscribing to kde-core-devel).

Please see above for my explanation of difference between release and
deployment matters.

> KPW 4.9 based on KF5 will be included in all distributions following regular spring/fall
> releases as part of the fall 2012 release cycle (Kubuntu in October, Fedora in
> November,...).

That's early adopters, again. See, easy deployment/backporting is one
of core reasons why some projects choose to go with Qt-only.
The advancements in KF modularization addresses this, work in
progress. So again I fee I am operating in the transitional period.

> Canonical is currently even planning to include Qt 5 with Ubuntu 12.04 and ship a Unity
> version based on that (they don't want 5 years of maintenance burden for deprecated Qt
> 4.x). openSUSE 12.2 (ETA July 2012) will at least include Qt 5, although probably not KF5.
> Users of rolling release distributions (Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, ...) will get Qt 5,
> KF5, and KPW 4.9 as soon as they get released.

I did not call for pausing the transition for 5 years, do you? I'd
look pragmatically at what is good time to drop the support of given
distro.

> So yeah, many users will get Qt5/KF5 pretty soon. I don't think it would be wise to do any
> Calligra release after summer 2012 that requires Qt 4.

When will this end? With this deployment strategy, again and again we
lack the stability - constantly (practically) requiring to reinstall
whole OSes to get minor upgrade for apps. Typical installation is a
hybrid. There are apps like Umbrello used with Qt3 by many, including
me under KDE 4.

10.04 LTS  support ends in 04/2013.
12.04 LTS support ends in 04/2017 - it'll be very very new by the time
of our release and it will include Qt 4 of course. It's not guessing
if I say not every apps that use Qt4 will drop Qt4 by the time. Also
KDE apps. So the distro will include KDE apps v4, right?
Why Linux users cannot have access to installable apps as on other
OSes and have only to deal with what was available within the time of
first 1 or 1.5 years?
If you tell me that's not your business, I am OK with this. But the
explanation that users generally constantly upgrade OSes is not the
answer for me.
I don't propose to have Calligra/Qt4 maintenance until 2017 but to
consider another Qt4-based release after 2.4. We plan to release more
frequently in Calligra.

I see that KDE Workspaces switch in some areas to QML what is not a
minor update, it's indeed upgrade to series 5 of KDE. I cannot assume
the desktop will be rock stable starting from the .0 release (e.g.
because of the big technological change). So the "many" users you
meant, are early adopters.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)