why kdelibs?

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Saturday 30 October 2010, Juan Carlos Torres wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Cornelius Schumacher 
<schumacher at kde.org>wrote:
> > On Thursday 28 October 2010 John Layt wrote:
> > > Big questions.  Anyone with big answers? :-)
> >
> > Here is a big answer:
> >
> > Let's merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let's put all KDE
> > libraries,
> > support libraries, platform modules into Qt, remove the redundancies in
> > Qt, and polish it into one nice consistent set of APIs, providing both,
> > the wonderful KDE integration, consistency and convenience, as well as
> > the simplicity and portability of the Qt platform.
> >
> > I know what you think ("madness", "no", "KDE 5", "impossible",
> > "governance",
> > "binary compatibility", "Nokia", "impossible", ...), but if you put that
> > aside
> > for a while and think big, wouldn't that be a wonderful answer to all the
> > struggles we have with kdelibs?
> >
> > We all love Qt, without it KDE wouldn't exist. We also love the KDE
> > development platform, it provides all that what Qt doesn't have or didn't
> > have
> > at some point in time. But is there still a real reason to keep them
> > separate?
> > Wouldn't it be much more elegant, if you wouldn't have to decide, if to
> > use some KDE classes or write a "qt-only" application, if you would get
> > all the wonders of KDE from Qt in one consistent way?
>
> Sorry for butting in, but I just have to ask: Do you basically mean that
> the "KDE Development Platform" cease to be "KDE" and become part of Qt?
> Let's say this were possible, would KDE (or marketing-compliant, KDE SC)
> then
> become simply apps using Qt, probably with tighter platform integration on,
> for example, Linux?
>
> I mean, the thread started out as "why kdelibs?". With the answer you
> offered,
> the question in my mind now becomes "why KDE at all?" Or "what would KDE's
> selling/differentiating factor be?

I think it would mean that the KDE development platform (kdelibs) which we 
have right now, would become a set Qt modules maintained and developped by 
the KDE community, i.e. with our "stamp" on them.

The KDE desktop/Plasma would stay just the same.
The KDE apps would stay just the same.

Alex