What's the official status of 3.5.x, anyway?

[Duncan]

I looked at kde.org but couldn't find any official current statement on 
this.  But perhaps my google-foo is simply screwed up ATM.

There's a discussion on this over at Raiden's Realm too, ATM, which is 
where I got the link to Aaron's statement, below.  (I had read it at the 
time, but was going to have to look for it.  Someone there already had 
the link tho, so that was cool.)  Follow the discussion link:

http://raiden.net/news/kde_43_-_toys_plasmoids_and_rcs_oh_my/

So to the question:

Almost a year and a half ago, ASeigo had this to say:

> This year, as with most years since KDE3 emerged, there have been huge 
> deployments of KDE 3 based software. These deployments will not shift
> for years to come, no matter what KDE4 is. This is because large
> institutional deployments (government, corporate, educational, etc)
> typically have 3-7 year cycles (sometimes even longer) between major
> changes. Patches and security fixes? Sure. Major revamps? No. This
> alone ensures that KDE3 will remain supported for years. Why? Because
> there are users. 

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html

However, now I see this up on the official Gentoo KDE Guide page:

> KDE 3 is no longer maintained by upstream,
> with 3.5.10 being their last release.

Now that's not KDE-official, but the Gentoo KDE maintainers should know, 
and that page is Gentoo/KDE project official.  One wouldn't think they'd 
make the statement without having upstream backup for it.

So which is it?

And if it's the latter, why is the KDE project dumping KDE 3.5 while 
there are obviously still many many users, well before the 3-7 years 
ASeigo mentioned, AND while KDE 4 still has significant enough 
regressions in functionality (such as that of my last post, broken 
khotkeys multi-key support) that it remains "substantially broken" for 
many users, despite their best efforts to upgrade since (in my case) 
before 4.0 was even released (since I'm normally fine running beta 
software; that's water under the bridge now, but it's still 
"substantially broken" for my usage)?

If it's NOT the latter, then I have some serious questions to ask the 
Gentoo/KDE folks.

-- 
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

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