The future of KDE Development on Windows

[Andrius da Costa Ribas]

Hello,

Sticking to the items pointed by Aleix, in my humble opinion:
- We want KDE on Windows to keep being a distribution? Should it be a
development platform or a site to download installers?
*We are both a distribution (installer) and a development platform (emerge)
and I think we should keep being both. I've been playing with kde-windows
development for a while, mostly in my small-free-spare-time to fix one or
another bug or feature in some applications of my interest. We're a very
small team and only a small part of this team is involved in packaging (I'm
not). Being a small team makes it difficult to keep a good documentation on
techbase to help newcomers find their way with the development environment
(we have techbase and userbase pages but they are rarely updated). I've
never played with KDE development outside of Windows, but once when I tried
building KDE software with BSD Ports I ran into problems very similar to
what people use to report about emerge, so I think IMHO it's more a matter
of getting used to the tool (sure emerge has bugs to be fixed but they're
not a major problem). The other problem I see is that we don't have CI,
sometimes it's tiresome to fix the very same bugs again and again, because
they're not reproducible in gcc/linux and we don't have a proper
documentation on what to avoid for better cross-platform (e.g. templates
vs. forward declarations, exports/imports)

- Do we want to focus on applications?
*Yes, we've been always focused on applications, plasma-desktop works more
like a proof-of-concept built isn't really usable.

- What's the Plasma role in KDE Windows?
*As a user I install kde-workspace mostly because of oxygen :) If plasma
itself could get more love I think it could get into a more usable state
:). Particularly I'd like to write a wrapper to KDE launcher to make it a
DeskBand (like ClassicStart8 and similar to Chrome's launcher) since
windows 8 and 8.1 don't have a good start menu (people say it'll be back on
win9) I'm just trying to find more free time to work on it.

- What frameworks to we want supported on Windows? [1]
*Most of them, except those Unix specific like KPty. For X11 specific
stuff, if there is a Wayland way, there is probably also a Windows way too.

- How has Windows changed since 4.0 release
Certainly more mature and stable. I use lots of the base apps at work
(Kate, dolphin, konqueror) and I'm also starting to use more complex ones
like Kexi.
KF5 modularity will help addressing the issue of having to install tons of
dependencies for a single app, but since windows is not like a distro that
includes common packages we will still have some overhead because of those
extra packages.

On 04/03/2014 03:41 AM, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
/snip/

 I find people expect native installers on windows, be it exe or msi. If
> you ask I'd look at priorities to see what apps to maintain on Windows,
> look what type of app is otherwise unavailable on Windows/Mac. Krita or
> Kexi comes as example. For apps that exist on Windows/Mac already and are
> hugely popular, like web browsers or text editors (Notepad++ which is
> FOSS), porting KDE equivalent (Kate) still can happen but mostly if there's
> special interest at KDE side. I do not expect particular popularity just
> because the app comes from KDE, expect when other ported apps benefit from
> them as components (here: Kate part).
>

I guess I'm at least partly to blame for this discussion. I happen to like
Kate, as I'm familiar with it, and not with Notepad++, but in my original
post, I mentioned
specifically something you can't get on Windows, AFAIK, even if you pay for
it: KSnapshot. A single app that lets you save a piece of the screen and
print it
all from the same app, without having to open another app and paste and
then print. But it doesn't work. It would be nice if you folks would fix
it.  There's something
fundamentally dumb about the snipping Tool!

> 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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