the future of kdetoys

[Stefan Böhmann]

Hi,

I tried to get an overview about the current state of each application in 
kdetoys and want to share my cognitions and also I want to make a proposal.

In short: I think the kdetoys module is dead.


Most of the 8 applications in kdetoys aren't in a good state.

1. kmoon
this applet is dead. cmake doesn't build it since revision 755452 (Jan 1.) 
because it is a kicker applet and kicker is dead. Also there is a plasma 
based alternative in [1] called luna.

2. fifteenapplet
same as kmoon. But there is a plasma based alternative in [1] called 
fifteenPuzzle.

3. eyesapplet
and the same here. But here I could't find an alternative plasmoid yet.

4. kweather
kweather is something curious. Some parts are ported (kweatherreport and 
kweatherservice) but of course the kicker applet itself isn't ported and 
isn't build since revision 755452 too. I'm not a regular user of this 
application so I can't say if the ported parts are useable without the applet 
itself - I do not think so. However, there is also a plasma based alternative 
in [2] called weather.

5. kworldclock
kworldclock seems to be ok for the moment, but didn't have a maintainer. Also 
Henry de Valence works on a new plasma based world clock (see [3]).

6. ktux  and  7. amor
No maintainer and as far as I know nobody did work on this applications since 
2006 (besides basic porting/i18n and similar tasks).

8. kteatime
I ported this application to KDE4 and took care of it since then.


So kmoon, fifteenapplet and eyesapplet are dead and should be moved to 
tags/unmaintained/4. I think this applies also to kweather. 

I'm not sure how to handle ktux and amor. You can compile and run both. 
However both didn't had a maintainer for a long time now and I personally 
think their gui looks like a relict from kde 2.0.

When the new plasma based world clock is ready in time for kde 4.1 also 
kworkdclock could be moved to tags/unmaintained/4. But I couldn't find the 
plasma applet in the svn repository so I have no idea which state it 
currently has. However - I wrote Henry a mail too, to point out this thread 
to him. Maybe he can brief us about his work and further plans.


But now my real question/proposal:
I don't see any new application for kdetoys. All the shiny new toys (bball for 
example) are plasma applets and therefor placed in extragear/plasma or 
similar. All (possible) alternatives for the dead (or nearly dead) 
applications in kdetoys are also plasma applets.

On the other hand the only applications with a maintainer in kdetoys 
(kteatime) is not only a toy, it's also a utility. 

So the final question is, should we possibly keep kdetoys with only 
one "utility"? Or should we move this application(s) to kdeutils or extragear 
and remove kdetoys entirely.

My personal proposal is to move kteatime (and possibly kworldclock) to 
extragear and remove the kdetoys module from KDE (i.e. moving it to 
tags/unmaintained/4).

What do you think?


Regards,
 - Stefan


[1] http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/plasma/applets
[2] http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/plasma/applets
[3] http://www.commit-digest.org/issues/2008-03-23/