[kde-linux] Revive Quanta+?

[Duncan]

john Culleton posted on Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:28:25 -0500 as excerpted:

> Quanta+ (packaged as part of Kwebdev) is perhaps the single most useful
> and unduplicated app in the KDE suite. However it died when KDE4 came
> out.
> 
> Has anyone yet picked up the torch to update Quanta+ to work with KDE4?
> I keep a Slackware 12.2 partition on my computer just for this one app.
> There is the Trinity project but the VPL editor is missing from the
> Trinity version of KDE3, which can run in parallel with KDE4. also today
> none of the Trinity downloads will work.
> 
> There are lots of useless projects in the KDE world, like Kword and
> Kspread (Libre beats both.) But Quanta+ has no rivals in the Linux
> world. Perhaps some resources could be tempted to work on this project.
> It has an audience of loyal fans.

While IIRC I've never used that app, I do see kde4-port-requests for it 
from time to time.  And IIRC someone did start the port at one point, but 
AFAIK they moved on to something else and no one else has ever picked it 
up.

That's how it goes with all-volunteer projects (and while some people get 
paid to work on kde, in that case it's that business volunteering, I 
don't believe anyone but maybe a sysadmin gets paid by kde itself), 
pretty much.  If no one with the appropriate skills (or money to pay for 
someone who does) has sufficient itch, it doesn't get scratched for other 
users lacking the skills/money, either.

Thus, what I can say is that if it has a sufficient audience of 
sufficiently loyal fans, even if they don't have the skills, if they're 
sufficiently loyal, someone will without a doubt step forward with a fund-
raising drive to give the apparently missing motivation to someone who 
does have the skills.  Lacking that, while there's obvious interest at
/some/ level (or I'd not see the occasional requests/inquiries), there's 
also obviously not /enough/ interest to either directly or indirectly 
(money) motivate someone with the skills to do that port.

It's too bad, really, but don't give up hope.  It wasn't /that/ long ago 
that pretty much all of kde4 was still rather broken.  (I've repeatedly 
stated my position that despite claims of being ready for ordinary use, 
4.2 was clearly alpha, 4.3 was early beta, 4.4 was rc, and only with late 
4.5 (4.5.4+) did things finally reach proper release status.  That was 
only about a year ago.)  So it's quite possible that someone might yet 
step up to port quanta+, now that kde4 itself is reasonably stable.

OTOH, with all the bad blood in the early kde4 era due to claims that 4.2 
and 4.3 especially were ready for ordinary use when they clearly weren't, 
and due to killing kde 3.x support after a very high visibility promise 
that it would continue as long as there were users and before its 4.x 
replacement actually worked properly, it's also very possible, even 
likely, that anyone who /might/ have been interested in porting quanta 
ended up quitting in disgust and switching to some other less broken 
desktop, never to think about working on or using kde again as they don't 
want to be associated with that reputation.  I certainly couldn't blame 
anyone for that as I too might well have gone elsewhere if there were any 
other freedomware desktops as full-featured as kde in general, that 
respect and encourage user customization to the degree that kde normally 
does.  But I'm stubborn and stuck with it, and while I ended up switching 
to non-kde solutions for most of my apps and have semantic-desktop turned 
off at build-time (gentoo so USE=-semantic-desktop), I'm now happier with 
the core kde4 (minus semantic-desktop) than with kde3, however long it 
took to get to that stage, and even tho it's too bad I had to jettison 
all the kde3 apps I used to run to get there.

-- 
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