The future of KDE Development on Windows

[Chris]

I think people took my mostly tongue in cheek <rant> a little too seriously 
I meant what I said, but the cheeky part was adding the <rant> tags I now 
wish I hadn't It seemed to make people take my words to heart.

Let me get one thing absolutely clear. The development work everyone has 
done on both KDE and KMyMoney is absolutely outstanding. I cannot comment on 
other stuff as I am not across it. My comments about the emerge system being 
fragile does not take away from it. It would be nice to have some more 
documentation, particularly pointing out the difference between kdewin 
emerge and gentoo emerge. online searches can result in a lot of confusion.

Unfortunately KDE itself as has been pointed out by others is perhaps not so 
windows friendly. As for KDE Frameworks 5 I have only heard about it a few 
days ago and while I did do a fair bit of searching as to what it does I am 
still pretty unclear. If it separates out some of the purely KDE stuff from 
the more portable stuff then that is excellent.

My thoughts on your head popping questions...

 >> Some questions pop in my head:
 >> - We want KDE on Windows to keep being a distribution? Should it be a 
development platform or a site to download installers?
You will get more uptake if windows developers can work on their platform. 
This means more cross pollination and better testing and more importantly 
more developers.

 >>- Do we want to focus on applications?
Is there another reason to port KDE to windows?

 >>- What's the Plasma role in KDE Windows?
Windows is windows. If people want the plasma desktop they would install 
linux and use it. I personally do not think it is worth making a priority. 
but I dont know how tightly integrated it is with other parts of KDE

 >>- What frameworks to we want supported on Windows? [1]
 >>- How has Windows changed since 4.0 release?
I cannot comment meaningfully on the above. this little project of mine is a 
return to C++ windows programming for me after years in the php wilderness

To me this is all about the applications. Windows users are starved of good 
open source alternatives. Though that has changed significantly over the 
last few years.
When users realise all their favourite applications are actually open source 
apps they may then look at making a more permanent switch.

Even I am not quite there but that has a lot to do with my day to day job.

Might I also add. While as linux developers you are all used to using a 
command line driven build process. Windows developers are not so used to it. 
The whole cmake based buld system can be awfully overwhelming. When it works 
it works just great. When it doesn't its a case of "WTF. Why won't this 
stupid thing find that xyz library its right there in the bin folder!!!!"

If the steep learning curve could be kept in mind it would certainly help 
people like me (an old dog trying to learn new tricks) stay sane.

Chris


On 3/04/2014 12:20 PM, Aleix Pol wrote:
> Hi,
> To be honest, I didn't expect people to use the occasion for ranting. We 
> all know it's been hard to do multiplatform development on kdelibs 4, 
> that's for granted. That's why some of us went through kdelibs and made it 
> become the KDE Frameworks 5. It's been a massive project, and we've done 
> it for cases like KDE Windows.
>
> I think we should take this occasion to take a step back and re-consider 
> the project. Let's figure out how we want things to work, what we liked 
> from what we used to have and what we didn't.
>
> Some questions pop in my head:
> - We want KDE on Windows to keep being a distribution? Should it be a 
> development platform or a site to download installers?
> - Do we want to focus on applications?
> - What's the Plasma role in KDE Windows?
> - What frameworks to we want supported on Windows? [1]
> - How has Windows changed since 4.0 release?
>
> I think there's a huge space for discussion there and now it's the moment 
> when it should take place, so that we can plan the bigger picture by 
> taking Windows into account.
>
> Aleix
>
> [1] http://community.kde.org/Frameworks/List
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Kde-windows mailing list
> Kde-windows at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-windows

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