[rkward-devel] Development plans

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi all,

this mail is to give a very rough outline of what is about to happen next in 
RKWard development. The big issue, here, is KDE4 migration. KDE4 is scheduled 
to release in December, and while I guess that date may easily slip another 
few weeks, time has come to start worrying about porting.

No matter what, transition to KDE4 will be painful. For one thing, porting 
looks like a pretty huge task. For another, it will probably take a long time 
for many distributions to make the switch to KDE4, so many users (and 
developers) will be stuck with KDE3 for some time to come. On the other hand, 
the KDE4 will offer a number of wonderful opportunities for improvements in 
RKWard, including but not limited to a windows port.

What I plan to do is to focus on the KDE4 port from now on. That is, I will 
try to set up a KDE4 development environment 
(http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Set_up_KDE_4_for_development), open 
a new branch in SVN, and try to get the basic things working. No idea, how 
long this will take, but I'd like to encourage you to set up a KDE4 
environment, soon, as well.

Future development will be mostly for KDE4, only. Version 0.5.0 will be the 
first to be a native KDE4 application. However, I expect to produce at least 
a bugfix release for KDE3 some time before or after 0.5.0. Maybe some changes 
in plugins will also be released for KDE3, but not much else will happen for 
KDE3 versions any more. The KDE3 version will be called 0.4.9 (and - if 
needed - 0.4.10 after that), even if it might be released after 0.5.0 (time 
will tell).

For the time being, you will not need to make any adjustments. However, note 
that not much further development will happen on KDE3 versions, and please be 
prepared to set up a KDE4 system relatively soon. I'll keep you up-to-date on 
the progress towards KDE4 migration.

Regards
Thomas
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