[Kstars-devel] Qt4 porting

[Jason Harris]

Hello,

Well, we already have an issue to deal with.  People outside our team are 
starting to port the kde4 branch already.  What should we do about it?

1) try to prevent it, as it obviously conflicts with my proposed plan, or 

2) allow it to happen, and maybe most of the porting work will be done "for 
free"?

My knee-jerk reaction was (1), but I asked about this on kde-edu, and the 
possibility of (2) was pointed out to me.  I don't think (2) is very likely, 
but the bottom line is, we are asking people not to help us with a huge, 
boring task.  That just seems wrong. :)

What do you think?  Just go ahead and let kde4 stuff happen, and we'll ignore 
it and finish our 3.5 stuff first?  Another possibility is to "go with the 
flow", and attempt a rapid conversion to qt4 *now*, so that we can continue 
features-development in kde4 without too much interruption.  The disadvantage 
here is that 3.5 would be a pretty minor release, but it was always going to 
be a stopgap anyway.  

IMO, the most realistic option is to continue developing in 3.5 for now, and 
let kde4 stuff happen.  Along the way, we can try to forward-port changes to 
kde4, unless it gets too painful.  However, it will be critically important 
to document everything in 3.5 that needs to be ported to kde4.

I think our only alternative is to lobby to be removed from the kde4 branch 
until we are ready for it (I believe kdepim is doing this already).

thoughts?

Jason

-- 
KStars: KDE Planetarium
http://edu.kde.org/kstars