[patch] KdePrint::createPrintDialog() on non-X11

[Alex Merry]

On Tuesday 08 July 2008 22:02:37 Harri Porten wrote:
> I'm just trying to find an explanation of why KDE 4 is still in such a
> poor shape compared to KDE 3 after so many years and what we can learn
> from that. The KDEPrint "rework" is just one example for one of the main
> factors I recognize: brute force removal or deprecation of many classes
> ("clean design", "portability") without any suitable replacement being
> available in time. The time horizon that KDE was "made ready for" may well
> exceed the life time of KDE 4.x. Letting users wait for such a long time
> is just crazy. Both for them and application developers.

Because the only developers who expressed any interest in libkdeprint were 
divided into those who had little or no time and those (John and me) who 
didn't have the skill or experience to actually get it into shape for KDE 4.

The fact the libkdeprint survived as long as it did with only the limited time 
Cristian could devote to it for maintainership is a testament to its design 
and implementation, but it didn't survive the huge upheavals of Qt/KDE 4.  It 
was a huge, complex beast and no-one really paid it any mind until two weeks 
before the soft freeze.

On top of that, Qt was starting to develop printing support, and had more 
support in the pipeline (such as QAbstractPrintDialog::setOptionTabs() and a 
print preview dialog).  So it was decided (on k-c-d, kdeprint-devel and by 
Cristian) to scrap it and use Qt 4.3's new printing support, because something 
simple that works is better than something complex that doesn't.

Alex


-- 
KDE: http://www.kde.org
Ubuntu/Kubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.org http://www.kubuntu.org