[kde-linux] Status of KDE 4.1.2?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday 12 October 2008, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Sunday 12 October 2008 08:20:54 david wrote:

> > features that should work but don't. I still think they should have
> > ported 3.5.x to QT4 and gotten it working, then started playing with the
> > glitter and eye candy.
>
> You just don't get it do you?  That was an impossibility.  Many things
> simply would not port to qt4 and had to be rewritten.

I think there is some need for a bit of clarification on this topic.

Actually purely porting to Qt4 as in making it build and link with Qt4 libs 
came first. Laurent Montel did tons of that work all over KDE.

At this stage some applications not only built but also worked, while others 
just build, i.e. small behavioral changes in libs lead to broken application 
functionality or weird visual effects.

The next step was cleaning up libraries and runtime support infrastructure, 
i.e. making changes that are only acceptable at major version changes due to 
introducing incompatabilities between base and apps.

Depending on an application developers' resources, they worked on replacing 
Qt3/KDE3 compat code with real Qt4 based one, sometimes performing similar 
cleanup task like the library developers.

Some application developers didn't have enough time to track the rapidly 
changing libs so they decided to improve on application specific things, 
somethimes related to visualization.

"Glitter and eye candy" have mostly been picked up by new developers, since 
they often didn't require as much domain knowledge or code reading than 
working on application internals.

My guess is that more than half of the long term contributors haven't reached 
the "Glitter and eye candy" stage yet, since they are still neck deep in 
cleanup/refactoring/modernization.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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