[Panel-devel] Kickoff / KDE 4

[Robert Knight]

Hi Riccardo,

The simplest answer is that the Kickoff works, now.  The aim was to
have an implementation of a tried and tested design which could ship
with Beta 3.

What I remember from the last IRC meeting and from talking to Siraj
was that Raptor was not going to be ready for the next beta
(originally due for tommorrow, now due next week).  I offered to
investigate Kickoff as a solution until then, and this is what I have
done.

> (and given that kickoff has seems
> to have some technical problems, speed is the main complaint actually from
> the guys using opensuse).

I did not discuss this in depth with others at Akademy although I have
heard Kickoff (KDE 3) described as "feeling heavy" in passing.  I
don't know exactly what the perceived problems are, but I get the
impression that they are implementation issues rather than a
fundamental design flaw.  I am happy to talk to OpenSuSE users and
developers for their opinions on the current Kickoff.
The big advantage here is that there are lots of users I can talk to
and seek opinions from.  There have been some small design changes
between the first version of Kickoff and the current version, and I
will look to incorporate those changes in the KDE 4 version.

To clarify again though, this is not the KDE 3 code ported we are
talking about, but a from-scratch implementation with KDE 4 / Qt 4
frameworks.

Regards,
Robert.

On 25/09/2007, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 September 2007, Eike Hein wrote:
>
> to avoid unnecessary flame-fanning:
>
> > when hard work is being passed over,
>
> it isn't being passed over. there is nothing to pass over at the moment.
> it's
> a work in progress. when it is ready then it will be offered as an option at
> a *minimum* and will be examined for use in default set ups. but until it is
> ready, there is no possibility to do so. hope that explains things better.
>
> > but one way to
> > avoid that happening is for those who do the work to
> > talk to the rest of the project to make sure a design
> > is workable and agreed upon, and I don't think that
> > has happened here from what I've seen.
>
> the raptor developers have been talking to artists and other developers,
> including myself, for quite some time now. there has been communication,
> though the raptor team has chosen to run with their own UI theories rather
> than go to the OpenUsability folks. this is completely their right, and
> we'll
> see how it shakes out in the end. experimentation is good and all that. but
> yes, they have been communicative. just in their own way.
>
> relaly, it seems that it has mostly been people outside of the raptor and
> kickoff teams that have been helping confuse the situation =)
>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
> humru othro a kohnu se
> GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
>
> KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
>