current state of KDE_DEPRECATED ?

[David Faure]

On Thursday 16 March 2006 10:27, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Looks to me like common sense: why keep deprecated methods in KDE 4?
> The only reason why they'd still be there is compatibility:
Yes, the reason is compatibility, and that's a good enough reason for now, IMHO.
There's enough work porting away from qt3; porting away from kde3 just adds
to it, so why put even more work on our plate? We can leave it for later
(when rewriting code we then take the opportunity to fix some deprecation warnings)
instead of breaking compilation in all kde modules for no urgent reason and
driving more people away from trunk because it doesn't compile...

> >And what about moving deprecated classes to kde3support? I don't know if
> >I ca do this without breaking a lot of kde programs...
> 
> KDE3Support is really a big question mark unanswered. Who's going to write 
> it? 
kde3support doesn't need to be "written" from scratch, it's mostly classes from
kde3 ported to KDE4.

> Who's going to maintain it until *at least* KDE 4.2?
The same people who maintained those kde classes in kde3 (yes that means
nobody for some of them, so what? it was good enough for kde3 ;-)

> Who's going to make sure that its behaviour is the expected behaviour under KDE3?
You mean KDE4.
Well, I did for some parts of K3ListView, for instance. Anyway a possible small bug 
in K3ListView is _much_ less of a problem than having to rewrite all the kde code
that uses K3ListView right now !!!

I don't think those "who's going to" questions lead anywhere. I could ask the same
about the non-deprecated classes in kdelibs, and we all know that the answer isn't
"there's an active maintainer for every class". You and I and a bunch of other people
are trying to put some order into kdelibs, but still it doesn't mean you can answer
"who's going to maintain class XYZ until KDE-4.x" even for a non-deprecated class.

> Qt3Support is a nice idea on Trolltech's part, but it has spoiled us. I 
> don't think that we, as KDE developers, can create a transition library 
> like Qt3Support. Think of all the old deprecated interfaces that have 
> *already* been removed, like the whole of KMdi.
Sure. I don't miss kmdi. But I really think that a lot of the code would miss
K3ListView if it went away now.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).