"Cornelius's grand plan" - Merging KDElibs into Qt

[Dario Freddi]

On Monday 01 November 2010 08:45:00 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday, October 31, 2010, Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> > What do you think about it?
> 
> i think it isn't a plan as much as it as an open ended question that we
> really don't have the ability to answer very well right now.
> 
> 
> unfortunately, it was also positioned on some rather dubious claims such
> as: "Over the last couple of years, KDE development has constantly shifted
> from library development to application development. Our struggles with
> even just doing the basic maintenance of the libraries show that.
> [...]There are still brave souls taking care of kdelibs, but it's really
> hard to keep up there."
> 
> this is a line we've been telling ourslves for at least 6 years now.
> compare kdelibs now to then and the facts don't particularly align with
> the scary scenario outlined above. more importantly, if we look at Qt we
> can find all kinds of poorly or outright unmaintained stuff that causes
> issues because it is so. which means that merging with Qt willl not, in
> the least, resolve this kind of issue for us.

I am with Aaron here. Especially for my case, I found myself adding a lot of 
code in kdelibs for what I did in KDE - and it turned out my major 
contributions, aka KAuth and KIdleTime, had a rather relevant usage throughout 
the whole KDE. Of course, I would be very happy if those would be merged into 
Qt, but I don't see that coming, since while it would make sense for 
KIdleTime, KAuth is so specific to a desktop environment situation that I 
don't see how Qt could integrate that.

This - at least to me - means that we cannot and will never be able to do a 
full merge of kdelibs into Qt, since we will always need something more - 
after all, Qt and KDE have rather different goals. And it also means that 
people in KDE like kdelibs, and definitely want that "something more" we give. 
I'd even go ahead and say that it is probably kdelibs the thing which sets the 
bar between KDE and $something.

My vision is very similar to Alexander's (Neundorf), and I'm not going to 
repeat what he already said, but I want to stress the point that if we ever 
plan to merge "something" in Qt, we'd better start with discussing the 
decision with Nokia.

-- 
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Dario Freddi
KDE Developer
GPG Key Signature: 511A9A3B
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