[Kde-bindings] [UPDATE] KDE 4.0.0 Release Schedule

[Richard Dale]

On Saturday 08 September 2007, Allen Winter wrote:
> On Friday 07 September 2007 2:44:28 pm Richard Dale wrote:
> > On Friday 07 September 2007, Allen Winter wrote:
> > > Additionally, we are introducing a new "KDE Development Platform"
> > > release to occur in late October.  These release will contain all the
> > > bits and pieces necessary to develop KDE4 applications; meaning it will
> > > include kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase/runtime.
> > > NOTE the earlier freeze date for these modules and make sure you
> > > don't miss the deadline (3 Oct) to get your fixes in.
> >
> > Should language bindings be part of the development platform? We should
> > have Python and Ruby in good shape by late October, and possibly C# too.
>
> Seems like a very good idea.
>
> You'll be ready for a 3 Oct freeze?
> With only bug fixes after that?
Yes, both the Python and Ruby bindings are based on the Qt4 bindings and so 
they've had plenty of time to settle down and mature. I don't think there 
will be any major changes before the final KDE 4.0 release, just bug fixes 
and adding new classes, better documentation on the kde wiki etc. The Kross 
python and ruby scripting bindings should also go in the release, and I think 
they're stable.

The main technical improvement to the Smoke based bindings (ie Ruby and C#) 
will be that the underlying library is being tweaked so that it can be split 
up into separate libs to corresponding C++ libs that they wrap. At the moment 
the KDE and Qt bindings are all in one big 'libsmokekde' lib. Arno Rehn is 
working on modularizing Smoke in a branch, and he has it quite close to 
working I believe. But we won't promote that branch to the trunk until we're 
100% happy there won't be any regressions (and after the October release). It 
will have no impact on applications written in the bindings - they won't need 
any changes. Once we've made Smoke more modular it will be easy to create 
bindings apis for KDE libs other than kdelibs, such as kdepim.

I think we should leave out the C# binding in the October development 
platform, so that we can have a clear marketing message that KDE4 development 
is easy in Python or Ruby. Maybe some kind of competition for best ruby or 
python kde app would get things started, I don't know.

-- Richard