why kdelibs?

[Parker Coates]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 13:01, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Cornelius Schumacher 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?
>
> I know we keep coming to the same place, but no, it would not be a wonderful
> answer, it would be a disaster like it was for KPrinter.
>
> Just for those that have short memories let me explain what happened.
>
> We killed our printing stack because we were "promised" that QPrinter would be
> maintained and better than KPrinter was. And years later, QPrinter is
> unmaintained and provides less features KPrinter delivered much more years
> ago.
>
> So please come back to the real world were Nokia doesn't have infinite
> manpower and where the only thing Nokia wants to do is sell cell phones.

I think Qt's semi-adoption of Phonon is another very (probably even
more) relevant example. At the time everyone (myself included) thought
it was a really great move. KDE produced code would see a wider
audience and Qt would take on some of the maintenance load. Win-win,
right?

But it turns out that Qt's needs didn't fully match KDE's so the KDE
version had "go on without" the Qt version. Nowadays, Qt's Phonon is
nothing more than a mild inconvenience for KDE, as every few weeks
someone shows up with KDE/Phonon build conflicts.

Parker