Making Grantlee a KF5 Framework, take 2

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi (especially those who would be in contact with Stephen, see end).

OLD PLANS REVISITED

The old plan was to turn the two libraries part of Grantlee (main one being 
for text templating, second one for markup generation, see grantlee.org) into 
KF modules in time for KF6.

With KF6 still some decent time away, and Grantlee upstream with stalled 
development (even seeing forks already), it might be better to execute the 
KFying plans already now. And by that also shift some workload from the Qt5/
Qt6 port time away to now.


WORKING KF5 VARIANT ALREADY PREPARED, INCLUDING CONSUMER PATCHES

While so far we have yet to manage to reach Stephen to see him agree on and 
bless the new plan, work has been done to prepare a KF5 variant of Grantlee 
meanwhile, tracked in this task:
    https://phabricator.kde.org/T14887

The current result is:
* a working KF5 module variant of Grantlee (mainly missing code reformat and 
SPDX headers, but already prepared separately)
* working patches for all known users of Grantlee in KDE (as well as Kraft as 
another known user in the outer spheres).
See the linked task above for the KFGrantlee repo and the patches to the 
consumers.

So basically prepared, just missing out on complete licenses and name 
transfer. Modulo further review by KF developers of course :)


KF 5.88 WOULD BE A WELCOME TARGET

In a perfect world we could add the text templating library of Grantlee as a 
KF module for KF 5.88 begin of November (the markup generation would be solved 
differently, as fork for now in the only left consumer kjots, see task for 
details).
This would allow to switch the majority of Grantlee consumers, 10, which are 
part of KDE Gear, without #if#else to KF Grantlee for KDE Gear 21.12. While 
seeing to have the other 3 either have a patch release before with build 
support added or provide distributions with patches for that. So the 
distributions can switch all the packages to use KFGrantlee at the same time, 
no need to juggle two variants of the same library at the same time.

Now KF 5.88 tagging is just less than 5 weeks away, so this might appear a bit 
rushed. But it is also a small window of opportunity, with developers around 
with attention to the matter, and where things could be aligned. And after all 
the codebase is pretty mature after all the years, and the recent 
modernization patches should not have had much of a negative impact. So giving 
it a try.

Otherwise I would propose KF 5.89 in December as a target and ask for allowing 
KDE Gear 21.12 to dependent on that, even if released just a few days later by 
current schedules.


CONTACT TO STEPHEN  NEEDED, IDEALLY NOW

As Stephen already pointed out as reason in the original proposal, other 
interesting things in life have taken over his resources and focus. Yet we 
need his input for two things, so for that we need someone who could interest 
him to spend some 10 more minutes on his former, so important to us, work :) :

a) Review and merge this prepared commit in his authorship which adds missing 
license headers to some files:
    https://github.com/steveire/grantlee/pull/75
b) State by an email to kde-core-devel at kde.org or kde-frameworks-devel at kde.org 
he is fine with us taking over the name Grantlee for the new KF variant of the 
library, as official successor of his work.

In case please consider to share personal details by PM with me, let's keep 
private things private :) Otherwise any help very welcome to resolve these two 
blockers.

Cheers
Friedrich