hedging out bets: Frameworks and Qt5

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all..

there have been a number of people who have expressed concern about us 
starting work post-4.7 on Frameworks (the next BIC version of 
kdelibs+runtime+etc) and Qt5 not being ready yet, openGov not proven, etc.

despite our best intentions, as we can't see the future, these concerns are 
valid and need addressing. we discussed this at Platform 11, in fact, and the 
decision to start development of Frameworks on Qt4 is no accident.

in case of an indefinite Qt5 delay, "plan b" is to continue making releases of 
the 4.x versions workspaces and apps. getting Frameworks things done first 
without pulling the entire codebase into that particular development cycle 
allows us to continue to develop and release our various applications without 
pause.

that is how we hedge our bets.

given the development goals of Qt5 and how poorly "wait for the next version 
of Qt" to arrive worked out for us last time (in no small part because it was 
an all-or-nothing adventure of libs+desktop+apps), getting library work 
started now is, we feel, wise.

note that we have a lot of library work to do before Qt5 comes out that does 
not depend on Qt5 at all (in particular, the modularization).  Qt5 (or the dev 
branch for it) will not be a dependency for Frameworks until it's a valid 
target, as determined by us. so if Qt5 were to get really screwed up, we still 
have our work in Frameworks based on Qt4 that is all valuable, valid and 
releasable and app development will not have been held up.

i hope that helps answer some of the questions that are floating out there :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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