New Feature for kdelibs (Was: The case for a kdelibs 4.8)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday, November 9, 2011 23:44:21 Andrea Diamantini wrote:
> 4.x is where I'm living/fighting/coding/writing now.

for apps and workspaces, that is perfect. we don't want to disrupt app and 
workspace development while we get kdelibs prepped for the next major release.

> I'm sorry to say, in my mind next version of kdelibs is 4.8.

your mind is wrong. whatever the version number might end up saying (probably 
to keep packagers and users from confusion) it'll be the 4.7 code base with 
continued bug fixes applied :)

> And it will be based on the upcoming (not yet released) Qt 4.8.

sure; but this is a non-relevant detail.

> Thinking about "frameworks" without having yet a decent idea of what will be
> Qt5 is impossible for me.

actually, Qt5 is irrelevant to most of the work that needs to be done in 
frameworks. we can, and are, working against Qt4 right now. most of the work 
is modularization and modernization (while preserving source compatibility)

we are merging some things upstream into Qt5, and the things that are merged 
upstream are going into a small temporary library call libinqt (lib in qt ;). 
when Qt5 arrives, that library will go away and we will be able to move to 
basing frameworks on Qt5. between now and then there is a lot of work on the 
modularization and modernization work.

for instance, Sune's proposal to improve KNotification requires absolutely 
nothing from Qt5. having that done before Qt5 arrives would actually be a 
bonus as we wouldn't have to juggle too many different kinds of changes at 
once.

i do recognize that there is not enough documented plans and direction for 
frameworks 5. there are a handful of wiki pages but they do not contain enough 
information; too much of that still resides in the heads of just a few people.

to help address that, i'm hosting an irc meeting in a couple weeks with people 
currently working on frameworks 5 with the aim of pulling together clearly 
documented goals, tasks and milestones. the date has not been fixed yet, once 
it is i will announce it here as well so interested parties can join.

i hope that with further documentation and clairty of goals that others will 
be able to see how they can get involved with frameworks and why now is a good 
time to do so.

-- 
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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