[kde-edu]: Intent to move Marble into KDE-EDU

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi Everyone,

Most people might be aware of it already but I'd like to formally express my 
intention to move Marble into KDE-EDU.

Marble is a generic geographical widget providing a globe that people can 
browse the world with. I recently added support for coordinate grids and 
started Wikipedia integration. I also started ways to measure distances 
between placemarks. Some recent screenshots:

http://developer.kde.org/~tackat/marble/marble13.png
http://developer.kde.org/~tackat/marble/marble12.png

I'm currently aiming for a move to kdereview within the next 10 days and a 
move into kde-edu once (right in time for KDE 4.0) the review weeks have 
passed.

By that time Marble should have also basic KDE-fication which would include 
- saving maps (in png)
- printing maps
- copying maps into the clipboard
- proper docs
- proper cmake inclusion

So if everything goes well, the first (already very stable) inclusion of 
Marble into kde-edu should happen around April 2nd.

This would still be right in time for the feature freeze on May 2nd and offer 
enough time to solve remaining issues and take possible slipping into 
account. 

I already talked with Albert in the past about maybe sharing funcionality with 
KGeography in the future in some way. Whatever the solution will look like, I 
personally think that this can only be fully addressed after KDE 4.0 has been 
released. Currently KGeography uses basically bitmaps to store and display 
data which is pretty inefficient in terms of flexibility as well as filesize. 
Marble uses a very smart combination of vectors and bitmaps which basically 
will offer improved quality for the maps, better accuracy, more flexibility 
and all this at much less file size than what KGeography needs to cover the 
world fully. I consider the availability of a 2D-View for Marble an 
additional requirement to merge functionality. And this feature won't be 
implemented not earlier than GSoC 2007, for which I offer my mentorship:

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas

So that's one of the reasons why merging functionality between KGeography and 
Marble in some way will likely have to wait until KDE 4.1

Torsten