Usage of KDE and MY persona

[Kevin Krammer]

On Tuesday, 2012-06-19, Duncan wrote:

> Additionally, kde5 aka kde frameworks, is going to continue the trend
> toward loosening up the lock-step between the components a lot.  Already,
> while kde3 and early kde4 was shipped as a handful of huge monolithic
> tarballs with a bunch of packages in each (kdegraphics, kdebase,
> kdemultimedia, kdegames, kdepim, etc), the sources are breaking up and
> individual packages are often shipped in their own tarballs, now.

While modules have always been separate release units, distributions usually 
split their binary artifacts even further, e.g. splitting kdegames into 
individual games plus a package for libraries shared between them.
Sometimes even splitting data from the game so updates of the game (code) does 
not require update of game data.

> Frameworks is supposed to continue that trend, splitting up much as x.org
> did into individual tarballs, but not just that, actually shipping them
> at different times instead of all together as now, but then having
> occasional milestone releases where everything syncronizes so that each
> piece is known to work with all the others at that specific point, once
> again.

KDE Frameworks 5 splitting efforts are mainly targeted at application 
developers, i.e. to allow them to individually choose dependencies more 
explicitly, thus assisting packagers.

And indeed one point is to open the option for decoupling releases. This might 
not be done right away, but at least should put some procedures into place to 
handle non-synchronized releases of KDE's wide product range.

> Meanwhile, there /are/ disruptive technologies coming down the pike,
> including wayland perhaps supplanting x.org.  That will take some time,
> but qt5 and kde5 should be the timeframe, and they're already preparing
> for it.  However, it should be emphasized that such changes are not of
> kde's doing, but that they must cope with them just as everyone else
> does.  KDE5/frameworks is planned to continue running on x.org, however,
> as well as wayland, assuming wayland does supplant x.org, and for kde5 at
> least, it's quite likely that you should be able to run kde on either,
> depending on which your distro chooses, of course.

I think in the context of "running KDE on wayland/xorg/whateverplatform" it 
makes most sense to remember that KDE is not a single product but a vendor 
with a large portfolio of software products.

Most applications do not have any X11 dependencies as of know so they will be 
unaffected by changes in the underlying windowing system (due to Qt's platform 
abstraction system QPA).

Some applications have lots of X11 dependencies due to the jobs they have been 
built to do, e.g. KWin was designed to be an X11 window manager and 
compositor, so it needs to understand all kinds of communication protocols 
that X11 clients (normal programs) use to communicate with the window manager.

If I understand its maintainer's blogs correctly, support for Wayland is 
something they want to have, e.g. running KWin as the session's Wayland 
compositor. Whether or not this means dropping code for being an X11 window 
manager cannot be said at this point. There hasn't been any statement in 
support for either option.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde/attachments/20120620/8720a55f/attachment.sig>
-------------- next part --------------
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.