Future of KDE Development

[Stefan Teleman]

On Thursday 17 February 2005 20:43, you wrote:

> Stefan: I think you have agreement to, and general support for, any
> changes that make KDE more portable, subject to meeting normal
> standards for code quality, and not introducing breakage. Coolo's
> wording might have failed the language barrier test - I read it as
> "hey, we already do that", rather than a criticism. Also, if they
> gave me a CVS account, I'm sure they'll give you one :-)
>
> Is there something in particular that needs to be done to the
> development process for KDE4? If so, please describe the issue and
> proposed solution, since I think you have an attentive audience. If
> not, Waldo's suggestion (roughly "if it isn't obvious what to do,
> turn up to kde-core-devel and discuss it") sounds like the best way
> forward.

Well, OK.

i have CVS write also. the situation at this point is: there are 
simply way too many patches for Solaris for me to begin checking in 
patches for 3.x. some of these patches break BC. some others rely on 
interfaces which are different between Linux and Solaris, just 
because these don't happen to agree. i am very reluctant to check in 
myself any Solaris patches for 3.x just because of these potential 
and very real conflicts. i don't claim to have a complete 
understanding of the consequences of Solaris patches on Linux or 
FreeBSD. besides, if everyone who builds KDE on Solaris has dealt 
with having tons of patches available separately for 2 1/2 years now, 
i think it's ok to deal with the same for another 6 months.

what i had in mind: since KDE 4 is a year away, i think there's enough 
time to work together and find a way to reduce the number of 
necessary additional separate patches, by finding an implementation 
which works on most platforms. my understanding is that for KDE 4, BC 
with KDE 3 needs not be maintained. so, i am offering to fix the 
things which don't happen to work on Solaris. but, there's also Linux 
and FreeBSD. so, i was asking if, in case we run into a situation 
where something works on Linux but not Solaris, or FreeBSD, or 
vice-versa, could we work together to try to find a common solution, 
rather than relying on separate source code patches. when necessary, 
by abstracting the OS-dependent interfaces, for example. i do realize 
that not everyone has access to Solaris machines or Sun compilers, 
and that's where i can be of help.

there are a lot of people who like KDE on Solaris and who try to build 
it themselves, and they run into problems, even with GCC. all these 
people will be much happier if the number of source code patches they 
had to apply was 1/3 the size it is now. many of them have repeatedly 
said so on kde-solaris.

--Stefan

-- 
Stefan Teleman          'Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition'
steleman at nyc.rr.com                          -Monty Python