[kde-linux] Kget "My Downloads" [Is this MS Windows?]

[Duncan]

James Tyrer posted on Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:51:40 -0700 as excerpted:

> I find that KGet still

I think that kget may be a holdover from the dialup connection era.  I 
know I hardly used it, and actually haven't had it installed at all for 
some time (years) now.  I wasn't actually using it before that, but I 
thought it was konqueror's download component, and thought it'd break 
that if I uninstalled it.  Once I figured out it was a separate program 
that I never ran anyway, I uninstalled it.

Of course now I've uninstalled konqueror as well, since for file browsing 
it uses the dolphin kpart anyway, so I have to have dolphin installed for 
that and I might as well use dolphin (tho that's only for the GUI non-
image file management, gwenview for images/video, and the mc "semigui" 
for sysadmin file management tasks), and apparently even the konqueror 
devs consider it little more than a toy for web browsing, explaining why 
it took so long to get anything close to reasonable security certificate 
management, as well as why the infamous 4.6 double-form-submit bug took 
two full monthly bug cycles to fix.  So firefox is my browser, and mc/
gwenview/dolphin are my file managers, and there's simply no functional 
hole left for konqueror to fill.

But back to kget.  It being a holdover from the dialup era that no longer 
has a real maintainer, and that is simply being held together by hacks 
from some other kde dev when something breaks, until it eventually gets 
to be no longer worth maintaining, would explain the hacks you see in the 
code, etc.

Meanwhile, kde5 aka kde frameworks is being designed to be far more 
modular, and already they're gradually splitting up the formerly huge 
monolithic tarballs into individual repos, with the core desktop intended 
to be much smaller and all these individual apps that are now part of the 
six-month core kde update and release cycle, will probably be shipped 
separately and updated on their own schedule.

And kget might be one of the apps that gets dropped by the wayside in the 
upgrade, since it's really not needed these days.  If it does get ported, 
it'll probably be on a rather long release cycle, with little further 
work put into it besides the bare minimum to keep it building and running.

OTOH, perhaps somebody new will take an interest and either develop a 
fresh replacement for it, or will rewrite it and kill the hacks that have 
built up over the years...

-- 
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