Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4

[Richard Dale]

On Tuesday 24 January 2006 22:25, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
>   * Do you intend to switch your activities to directly contribute
>     to KDE4/kdelibs/core technologies development, and leave your
>     app resting for the time being? (Sure, this would be *great*
>     because the current group busy already in KDE4 porting feel
>     they can use many more heads and brains. But I've also heard
>     some of you just do not like it, or don't feel competent in
>     that field...)
I don't work on apps and I don't work on kdelibs/core stuff either. I work on 
RAD environments - ie language bindings plus support for non-C++ languages in 
KDevelop. So where does that sort of thing fit in with this scheme. I'm 
working on C# bindings for Qt/KDE/Mono integration at the moment, and I'd 
like to put them in kdebindings and release as a later version of KDE 3.5 
like 3.5.3 or so, but not built by default at first. At the same time I think 
Ruby and C# bindings for Qt4 might be popular, so I need to work on them too. 
Obviously there isn't much point in wrapping the KDE 4 apis with bindings 
until they've settled down and been proven to work as a C++ api.

I think splitting KDE up into Apps vs. Core libs is the wrong way of thinking 
about it and marketing KDE. Work on Core libs is a subset of producing a 
development framework, and adding C++ support to KDevelop for KDE development 
should be given a higher priority in the project than it has now (I don't 
know how to make that happen). Then for custom internal application 
development we need Python, Ruby, Java, C# RAD development tools like IDE's 
and visual UI builders because only a small minority of programmers will ever 
be interested in writing custom apps in C++. 

At the moment there is very little work going into the next release of 
KDevelop 3.4 due in a few months, when it really should be seen as a flagship 
app and marketed up there with Plasma and so on. Why aren't we adding great 
support for Qt4 and KDE4 development into KDevelop 3.x, like Qt4 Qt Designer 
integration?

-- Richard