RFC: Bumping min. KDE Platform version to 4.6.0

Tue Jan 29 10:29:11 GMT 2013

Am Montag, 28. Januar 2013, 20:19:21 schrieb Inge Wallin:
> On Monday, January 28, 2013 19:33:22 Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> > Hi Inge,
> > 
> > Am Montag, 28. Januar 2013, 11:36:32 schrieb Inge Wallin:
> > > On Sunday, January 27, 2013 17:28:11 Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > > 
> > > > while I was working on sheets/plugins/calendar/CalendarTool.cpp to fix
> > > > the code for the "deprecated!" warnings in there I wondered why we
> > > > still depend
> > > > on KDE 4.3 as minimum platform, especially now that the min. required
> > > > Qt version has been bumped to Qt 4.7
> > > > 
> > > > Questions:
> > > > * is anybody known to rely on a KDE Platform <4.6?
> > > > * is known if the KDE Platform <4.6 works okayish with Qt 4.7?
> > > 
> > > I am using KDE 4.5.2.  I have built my own Qt 4.8.
> > > 
> > > And yes, it works quite well.
> > 
> > Hm. Strange combination, surely not often seen. :)
> 
> Yeah. The reason I built my own Qt was because Calligra upped the required
> version to 4.6. :)

4.7.0 even.

> > And am quite surprised to read that. May I ask why you are still on 4.5.2
> > (and missing out all the improvements, bug and security fixes for almost 2
> > 1/2 years)?
> 
> Mostly because I haven't taken the time to upgrade.  As soon as I get an
> external hard disk that I can use for backup I'm going to upgrade to
> OpenSUSE.

Looking forward to that then :) (assuming you go for a version of OpenSUSE 
which is more recent ;) ).

> > Especially as your personal setup so far seems to be the only reason to
> > still stick with 4.3 as min. KDE dependency.
> > And now forcing me to do a patch to bloat our code with many more #if
> > KDE_IS_VERSION..., to reduce the currently still insane amount of compiler
> > warnings some more. :(
> > 
> > Do you have any plans to upgrade your system in the next time? Or do you
> > have any server process running on your system of whose uptime you are
> > proud? ;)
> 
> No, this is my laptop so no server processes.  And yes, I want to upgrade
> ASAP actually (see above). Maybe I can do that while I'm in Germany next
> week. :)

Hehe, will give me a chance to physically influence that then :P

> Regarding the main question... I'm not against the upping of the required
> KDE version per se.  But I'm a little worried about the general notion that
> you need a late version of the OS to run a late version of an application. 
> MS has been so very successful partly because they acknowledge that people
> in reality are running old versions.

MS as platform seller (Windows) or as product seller (MS Office, IE)? I guess 
you mean the former, as indeed it's quite cool that you can run ancient 
programs usually also on the latest Windows, and it's said they invest quite a 
lot into having that.
But for their products, even if partially also for other reasons, MS is not 
that good as example. E.g. IE 10 only is offered for Win7 SP1 minimum, Office 
2013 needs Win7 as minimum as well.

MS also has lots more people. We do not even have enough maintainers for all 
the Calligra apps. And I wonder who is testing/using any branches besides 
master and their personal development branches. Now claiming to support also 
various combinatios of Qt 4.7/8 and KDE Platform down to 4.3 is rather brave, 
there are surely quite some flaws in those combinations waiting, just look at 
the issues there are with QTextDocument in the different Qt versions (seems 
4.8.5 partially broke stuff again, cmp. 
http://build.kde.org/job/calligra_master/lastCompletedBuild/testReport/(root)/TestSuite/libs_textlayout_TestBlockLayout/
). And noone might be able to reproduce them, as noone has those combinations 
available. So given the current mostly still experimental state of Calligra 
apps it might be really better to limit ourselves to a closer set of 
officially supported dependencies, to also limit the scope of problems.

> Many people, hackers especially, upgrade all the time. But many people who
> just want to use their computers and not fiddle with them do not.

Sure. But then they also hopefully do not e.g. wire them up to the internet, 
as old and out-of-maintenance software is prone to attacks. It's surely 
annoying, but IT is still in heavy revolution/evolution time. Years are ages 
here, and if you want to stay connected to the rest of the modern world, you 
need to update at least every 1-2 years. FLOSS usually at least tries to help 
you do not have to update your hardware as well.

And if people do not update, why do they want the latest Calligra? :) 
OpenOffice was fine enough a few years as well.

Also the potential userbase of Calligra is still not large enough to put more 
burdens on us developers for now, noone is yet depending on us.

Cheers
Friedrich