[KDE-India] Fw: Bits from the Qt/KDE team

[Kartik Mistry]

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Dear Team,

Here is Debian's plan with KDE4 :)

Cheers,
Kartik

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Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:27:14 +0100
From: Ana Guerrero
To: debian-devel-announce at lists.debian.org
Subject: Bits from the Qt/KDE team

Hi folks,

In December of 2007, members of the Qt/KDE team gathered in Cáceres,
Spain for a meeting sponsored by the Government of Extremadura. 

In the following weeks, we have been working towards the goals set at
that meeting, some of which have since been slightly altered.

 Plans for KDE 3
==================

We will release Lenny with KDE 3.

The current KDE version in unstable is 3.5.8, which will shortly
migrate to testing.  3.5.9 does not yet have a release date, but it
will be decided soon. Therefore, Lenny will most likely be released
with a version of 3.5.9 that includes patches for the most important
fixes from the upstream KDE 4 branch. Additionally, the
kdepim-enterprise branch is being merged with the current kdepim, which
will bring some features and bugfixes, most importantly to KMail.
Otherwise, the only major changes to our current KDE 3 packaging are
some re-working of the meta-packages and the removal of
meta-kde-extras. More info about this can be found on our webpage.
[0][1]

Furthermore, I would like highlight that in the last year, we have
attempted to reduce the number of bugs filed against KDE packages (see
graph [2]),  but it is difficult to keep the bug count low.  Since some
bugs fixed in KDE 4 remain in KDE 3, we will be closing them as fixed
in the KDE 4.0.0 using BTS's version tracking, and hopefully we will
manage to backport some of these fixes (the most important ones) to KDE
3.5.X. 

However, we will close bugs filed against applications declared dead by 
upstream, such as aRts.

 Plans for KDE 4
=================

We will be shipping KDE 4.0 development platform with Lenny.

As you may know, KDE 4.0.0 is being released on the 11th of January
(tomorrow!). 
We have been working very hard  to get some nice KDE packages into
Debian, and you can presently find KDE 4.0.0 packages in experimental.

Instructions of how to install KDE 4 from experimental are at our
website. [0]

The primary reason against shipping KDE 4.0 with Lenny is that this
release lacks many applications that would make KDE 4 a complete
desktop, such as KMail, and still requires a lot of overall polishing,
making it unsuitable for most users.  KDE 4.1 is expected to fix most
of these shortcomings, but the release date has not yet been finalised.
The KDE developers are currently discussing the release schedules for
KDE 4.0.x and KDE 4.1.  It appears that they are planning to do monthly
updates for KDE 4.0, and that KDE 4.1 will not be released before late
July, making it impossible to include within the current Debian release
schedule.

For Lenny, we will instead be shipping the "KDE 4 development
platform", consisting of kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime, and
possibly kdebindings. We are planning to upload the 4.0.0 release to
experimental, and probably next week, barring any problems, push these
3 packages into unstable. These packages are co-installable with the
current KDE 3 version, allowing users to run KDE 4 apps, such as the
new Okular document viewer, in a KDE 3 desktop.

There are still some issues that need to be resolved, such as migration
of configuration files, since we have patched KDE 4 to store its
settings in ~/.kde4 instead of ~/.kde .

KDE 4 will be easily installable using the upcoming meta-packages.  
See our website for more information. [0][3]

Finally, we are publishing all the relevant information on our website
[0] with the dual goals of keeping our users informed, and providing an
easy path for new contributors to join the team. But some information
is still work in progress :)

Ana,
on behalf of the Qt/KDE team.

P.S.: Anyway, you never know what the future will bring, we will review
our decisitions with respect shipping KDE 4 in Lenny in a few months.

[0] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/
[1] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/metapackages-kde3.html
[2]
http://users.alioth.debian.org/~pusling-guest/pkg-kde-buggraphs/_ALL_-year.png
[3] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/metapackages-kde4.html

- -- 
 Cheers,
 ----------------------------------------------
 Kartik Mistry | GPG: 0xD1028C8D | IRC: kart_
 blog.ftbfs.in | kartikm.wordpress.com
 ----------------------------------------------

A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets
people's attention.
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