[kde-linux] Thought in desperation

[Lars Koraeus]

On Saturday 05 December 2009 00:17:19 Duncan wrote:
> 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.
> 
Thanks I will take a look at Gentoo.

/Lars