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

Adam Treat treat at kde.org
Wed Jan 25 21:11:04 GMT 2006


On Wednesday 25 January 2006 4:10 pm, Richard Dale wrote:
> 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.

Personally, I think kdebindings should all be targetting Qt4 at this point and 
eventually KDE4 when it is stable enough.  Any bindings for the 3.x series 
are outdated by Qt4.  When application developers are beginning to make the 
switch to the new libraries, I wonder at the need for efforts based on older 
libraries.

> 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++.

Absolutely in agreement.

> 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?

Because KDevelop suffers from a terrible problem.  None of us have made 
KDevelop our priority app.  Most of the KDevelop developers work on other 
things or have other things/priorities going on.  It is not a good situation.  
And I agree, KDevelop and our KDE development tools do not get nearly as much 
attention as they require.  These apps and tools really should be the best of 
the bunch, but they are suffering from neglect.

Adam




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