[kde-linux] Status of KDE 4.1.2?

[david]

Kevin Krammer wrote:
> 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.

IOW, KDE4 was barely entitled to be called an early beta when it was 
"released" without using the word "beta".

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community