Plasma Workspaces 4.11: the last feature release in the 4.xseries for kde-workspace

[Kevin Kofler]

On Friday 03 May 2013 at 17:04:44, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> @Kevin: I am only remotely following this issue, but as PackageKit
> developer, I would of course like to see our project in Plasma
> Workspaces as soon as possible. But I don't know the exact issues
> here. Also, having KSecrets merged would be a nice goal too. (The
> SecretService API is very stable, and has the potential to become a
> new de-facto XDG standard soon)

The issues are the same in both cases: They're kdelibs features and kdelibs 
does not accept any features. By the time the first release of the Plasma 
Workspaces based on KF5 is planned, kdelibs will have been feature-frozen for 
THREE YEARS!!! (And I'm not even speaking of applications there!) This is a 
completely unacceptably long freeze period. It's time to reopen kdelibs for 
new features (though a lot of the damage has already been done! But still, 
it'd prevent any further damage) instead of freezing kde-workspace the same 
way.

> So, why not work on merging all this stuff into Workspaces 5 as early
> as possible, so it is present there?

Because Workspaces 5 / 2 / whatever (versioning and naming have become a total 
mess ever since the rebranding fiasco) is not anywhere near testable. Not even 
Frameworks 5 is (but my feature is not really testable without a working 
plasma-desktop anyway). At best I could dump a completely untested and 
untestable code drop.

In addition, even just compiling the change to verify that it even builds 
takes hours because there are no packages to work against. (We have Qt 5 
packages now going through review in Fedora, which is a lengthy process; KF5 
is not even started, and to be honest I'm not sure whether it even makes sense 
to start packaging it in its current stage.)

Testing my kdelibs 4.x patch was easy: I backported it to the version of 
kdelibs that was stable in Fedora, rebuilt my kdelibs package with it, updated 
kdelibs on my notebook, restarted plasma-desktop and tested the feature that 
way.

> (With having WS 4.11 frozen, it IMHO does not make any sense at all to
> develop new features for it, unless the new feature works on both
> Workspaces versions with less modifications)

The problem there is exactly that 4.x is frozen. It's not practical to develop 
features against 5 yet!

        Kevin Kofler