[RFC] KDE 4.0 Release Roadmap

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

I'm finally catching up with my emails after haviong returned from Cebit...

On Wednesday 14 March 2007 13:22, Allen Winter wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> Hereby we, the Release Team, present a draft KDE 4.0 Release roadmap which
> has been discussed on our mailinglist the past few weeks. It's an
> optimistic schedule that aims to release in late October, based on 3 Beta's
> and 2 release candidates.
>
> We tried to make a schedule that pleases as many people as possible, but
> you will understand that everyone has their own favorite agenda. So when
> commenting on the schedule you will need to think about who will benefit
> from the change and who will have trouble with it. Your personal interest
> might not be the one of the group.
>
> KDE 4.0 will not contain all features announced nor promised: these will
> come during the lifetime of KDE 4.  We can probably switch quickly to a
> KDE 4.1 release if there are major subsystems ready for merging soon after
> the KDE 4.0 hits the streets. Also remember that we have been porting for
> a couple years and we need to get this show on the road.

As you all expected:

> * The buildsystem requirements are fixed; i.e, must not require a
>   version of cmake greater than 2.4.5.

Currently I don't see a need to require a newer version than 2.4.5 on Linux 
and FreeBSD.

But I'm not sure for all other platforms:

Mac: seems to work currently as it is now.

Windows (MSVC, mingw): don't know, seems to work currently, at least on the  
cmake side

OpenBSD: there seems to be a serious problem as Marc Espie reported (shared 
library naming). So on OpenBSD a newer version might be required.

Solaris, NetBSD: no idea whether anybody has ever tried to build KDE4 on these 
platforms.

HP/UX, AIX: do we care ?

Which takes me to a question regarding our libs.
Qt is deployed on OSX as framework. Current cmake cvs cannot really create OSX 
library frameworks. Maybe this changes this year, Tanner Lovelave wanted to 
work on this. So, do we want to create library framworks for KDE libraries on 
OSX ? AFAIK it's the preferred style on OSX.

So, what about library frameworks on OSX ?
Do we also need to keep full BC on all platforms starting with KDE 4.0 ?

And another question:
The Qt libs are named now in CamelCase (libQtCore etc.). KDE libs are still 
libkdecore.so. How about chaning them to CamelCase too (libKDECore.so etc.) ?
This would make it
1) consistent with Qt libs naming
2) make it a bit easier to find the right lib to link to (for the buildsystem, 
for the build linker, for the runtime linker)

Since the names should be all covered by cmake variables, such a change 
shouldn't break too much.

Bye
Alex
-- 
Work: alexander.neundorf AT jenoptik.com - http://www.jenoptik-los.de
Home: neundorf AT kde.org                - http://www.kde.org
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