The case for a kdelibs 4.8

[Markus Slopianka]

On Donnerstag 29 September 2011 14:01:50 Kevin Kofler wrote:

> 2. It will be confusing to our users, and even to some packagers, to have a
> KDE SC 4.8 on kdelibs 4.7.

Since almost exactly 2 years we (esp. the promo team) are communicating that 
Platform/Frameworks, Applications and Workspaces are three separate products that just 
happen to be shipped on the same date.

One of the reasons why the rebranding still didn't get to everybody is that some 
distributions (mostly Fedora!) still spread the wrong message about some “KDE 4.7” to its 
users. (see eg. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE/KDE47Packaging#KDE_4.7_Packaging )

Users of other distributions do not have such problems and strangely shipping
Kontact 4.4.11 with SC 4.5+ was also not confusing to most users.


> The rule so far has always been that the kdelibs
> version must be the same as the KDE SC version.

There is no rule – at most a common practise and that was broken as well after Fedora 15 
has packages for SC 4.7 with Kontact 4.4.


> Changing this will also break all our Fedora KDE SC specfiles

Then fix your specfiles. AFAIK Fedora is also the last big distribution that still has 
monolithic packages like kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, and so on.
Take the opportunity to fix that as well.

openSUSE doesn't seem to have problems packaging 4.8 already:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=KDE%3AUnstable%3ASC


> And what will kde4-config --kdeversion output? The version of kdelibs?
Of course. What else? Want to see the Plasma version, enter plasma-desktop --version
If you want the version of Dolphin, enter dolphin --version and so on.

> Users are going to be confused: "Hey, I installed KDE SC 4.8, why does it
> say 4.7?"

Then you refer them to Wikipedia which holds that info since quite some time:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation_4#KDE_Plasma_Workspaces_and_Applications_4.8


> you will break Fedora packages even further.
Then – again – fix Fedora.

> The main reason that
> was given for dropping kdelibs 4.8 is that this means one less branch to
> worry about for the people working on kdelibs, but the people who'd work
> on 4.8 and 5.0 are NOT the same people!

Do you hereby declare that Red Hat will provide resources to create KDE Platform 4.8 and 
an cherrypick useful developments from the frameworks branch to Platform 4.8?