[kde-linux] Thought in desperation

[Duncan]

Kevin Krammer posted on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:35:09 +0100 as excerpted:

> The term Enterprise Distribution usually refers to a Linux distribution
> maintained by a company for several years. The company usually also
> offers service contracts which entitle customers to timely issue
> handling, etc.

> Using a community managed distribution has the advantage of getting the
> latest and greatest, but of course also means the will remove older
> stuff whenever they see fit.

While we're mentioning distributions...  I run Gentoo, here.  They're 
community, and tend to stick reasonably close to what upstream supports.  
That's part of why they're dropping kde 3.5 support right now -- neither 
qt nor kde are supporting their 3.x versions any longer.

However, for embedded work, etc, Gentoo is often popular, because as it's 
source based, for development on new platforms and embedded, there's a 
lot of stuff that "just works" with it, that would be a bit more of an 
issue with other distributions.  And the additional flexibility and build-
time troubleshooting done distribution wide when built from-source helps 
a lot too.  There's cross-compile and prefix (installing Gentoo as a 
secondary OS, in the user's homedir or otherwise elsewhere than /) 
support as well, for those that find such things useful.

What they're doing with kde3 is putting it in a community run overlay.  
None of the main Gentoo/kde project devs are running it any more, so it 
has been increasingly hard for them to maintain it already, but they did 
a reasonable job getting 3.5.10 in the tree awhile back, and kde3 is 
undertaking the transfer in a reasonably good state.  I honestly don't 
know how it's going to fair in the overlay, or even what its chances are, 
because I too switched to kde4 as-of 4.2.4 (so ~ 5 months ago, I'm on the 
latest 4.3.4 now), tho it was rough and I had to do a lot of custom 
scripting to replace functionality that simply isn't working, yet, etc.  
But the kde-sunset overlay is there, and I'm sure the folks using it 
would appreciate help from a company with the resources we're talking 
here, in maintaining it in working order.  How long it remains viable is 
now upto the users, working in the community with the folks doing long 
term support for other distributions.  We certainly do wish them well.

Thought I might as well throw that out, especially since we're talking a 
company that does some embedded work, so Gentoo might not be a bad fit in 
that regard.  And if the kde-sunset overlay goes well, it could be one of 
the last available options.  I simply haven't been following it closely 
enough to know if there are already strong leaders working with it there, 
thus helping to ensure its medium to longer term viability, or not.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman