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

[James Richard Tyrer]

Duncan wrote:
> 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 KDE 3 is no longer maintained by upstream,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.
> 
Well, there are people claiming to be developers saying that KDE-3.5 is 
unmaintained and closing KDE-3.x bugs on that basis.

Worse, without maintenance, people will not be able to continue to use 
KDE unless they set up a compatibility system with the old support libs. 
  I already have stuff that is broken when built against new lib 
versions and it has only been months, not years.

Most interesting, but not a serious problem, is that with KNotes, the 
SystemTray list shoes every note 6 times.

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch

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