ktouch/next ready for merge

[Laszlo Papp]

> It's  KTouch Version v1.7.1 the reports will be reported against. And most of
> them I'm going to be able to close as fixed in v2.0. But I don't expect a
> flood of the new bugs against the old version in the light of three new bugs
> in the year 2012 at all for KTouch.

pacman -Ss ktouch
extra/kdeedu-ktouch 4.9.2-1 (kde kdeedu)
    Touch Typing Tutor

For most of the people such entries will be dominant (i.e. 4.X) and
that is also presented in the bugreports as well, but this is beyond
the main point. There is one version for a cross-platform software.
There is no different versions for Windows and so forth in general for
end users. This has not been how the KDE and Qt softwares evolved.

>> Another thing to consider is that, at this point we do not know which
>> KTouch version will be better in the future for cross-platform. You
>> may disappear at some point for a valid reason, and someone picks up
>> the 4.9 version, and extend that, then that will be the official
>> version, I guess.
> Very true. Still I now which version is better in general. By far. Someone may
> use that criteria for determining what should be the official version, I hope.

Yes, your version is better for X, and the other variant is better for
the rest. None can be the official version or obsolete ultimately in
my opinion at this point.

> That anyone would continue on working on the old version I think is rather
> unlikely. I didn't happen in two years before I did show up and not in the six
> months I've developed on the new version in public. Why should it happen now,
> with the new version there?

Yeah, and nobody had been working on a new version either for quite a
while. ;-) I wish there had, but there is no guarantee you will be
here in a few months, and that is fine.

> And of now I'm still around and I'm at least not
> planning to disappear.

I think everybody says that when getting to a code. ;-)

> Porting it to Windows isn't impossible, just time
> doesn't permit to do so for KDE 4.10.

Like I said, fine, but the end users and distributors have a standard
now established, and decreasing that may be disappointing. I can say
that for one, this is yet another hassle for me when generating the
KDE Edu Windows installer.

> I've think the discussion should factor more arguments than availability on
> all platforms.

Believe or not, Windows is very significant in schools. :-) If you do
this for a new project from the beginning, it is acceptable, but it is
not for me for an existing standard.

> There is one big difference: all your distributions are maintained and up to
> date.

Nope. :-) The desktop version is way beyond the Harmattan (mobile)
version even feature and API design wise.

> Basically they are different implementations of the same application for
> various platforms.

As much as KTouch. :-)

> And they have common grounds: the shared engine/ folder
> and the themes data.

Nope. :-) They do not actually share the engine folder, nor themes.
They are exclusive.

> Those shared artifacts make it really advisable too put
> everything under in one tree from a maintenance point of view.

See above; no sharing.

> On the contrary for KTouch this would mean that I would create new top-level
> folder "old" or "non-X11" with the complete KDE 4.9 KTouch tree under it and
> and some CMake magic to use that on non X11 platforms. I'm not totally against
> it but I still not totally convinced of the benefits. It would make the life
> of the KDE Windows installer team a bit easier, but that's all I can see for
> now.

I believe, it is a significant difference. Just ask yourself: are you
pleased when your life is made more difficult?

Also, if someone would like to fix a trivial layout issue, or logical
behavior, they can just grab the relevant branch without further
suffixes and so forth. The less complexity, the better. I guess you
can imagine how many (sometimes unmaintained) subfolders I do not care
about when working on Qt5. Just one examle of those. :-)

> The contents of that folder would be as still unmaintained as before the
> branch. At least as long no one steps up and maintains it what I don't see
> happening. I'm really more than busy with making the new version as good as
> possible. And the end user still would get the old version on Windows,
> obviously.

Why do you care? It is there in a different folder. I do not
understand how this is any bad. To be fair: I have never seen separate
release branches for Windows and Linux in the history of Qt and KDE,
and that is why such an idea is weird to me. It does not for sure mean
it has never happened, if any, but I do not think it happened more
often than every 100th every blue moon (not literally). :-)

Laszlo