Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (955 mails)

[Kim Leyendecker <kimleyendecker@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 25.10.2011 05:09, schrieb Ilya Chernykh:
> Anyway, I just want to point out that if some software can be proven to
> "have no future", then the same argument can be applied to any other software 
> whatsoever.
> For example, one can arguably claim that KDE4 has no future because it will be 
> superseded with
> KDE5, Gnome 3 will be superseded by Gnome 4 etc.

AFAIK KDE5 won´t change that much like KDE4 did, so I guess it will be a 
KDE4 which is polished and tidied up a bit and running on top of Qt5.
Correct me please, if I´m wrong.

> There is simply no software with provably infinite future in the world. One only
> can speculate about the possible expected term of actual state for any
> piece of the software.
>
> > >  In case
> > >  you aren't aware of my qualifications to make this assessment, I've been part
> > >  of the team maintaining KDE at SUSE for the past 6 going on 7 years.
> > >
> > >  1) Quality and security.  Despite the KDE:KDE3 maintainer's high degree of
> > >  activity in packaging every KDE 3 app out there and adapting the KDE 3
> > >  platform to build on current distributions, it is a mistake to equate this
> > >  with sufficient maintenance to ensure adequate code quality to include this 
> > in
> > >  our distribution.
> At least I am sure the code's quality did not decrease since the last KDE 3 
> release,
> don't you think so?
>
> > >  The KDE 3 and Qt 3 codebases are massive, include code in
> > >  all the worst places to have a vulnerability,
> > >  have been essentially
> > >  unmaintained for over 2 years now, and *include many known bugs and
> > >  vulnerabilities that have only been fixed in the 4 releases*.
> Good. Can you provide some links to the vulnerabilities bugreports or
> something related?
>
> > >  Assurances that the project is now maintained upstream by the Trinity project
> > >  are hollow; the Trinity group is only a handful of people, none of whom are
> > >  the original maintainers or developers of the code,
> This is also the case of KDE4. Who of the KDE4 team are the original developers
> of KDE 1 or KDE 2 ?



> > >  and most of their effort
> > >  is spent on writing a Qt4 compatibility layer and in porting the build system
> > >  to cmake, not maintenance.
> I think it would be impossible to port the code to cmake without maintenance?
> Am I wrong?
>
> > >  In any case, the packages in KDE:KDE3 are based on
> > >  3.5.10 and only include some changes from the Trinity project's fork, which 
> > is
> > >  now 3.5.12.
> This is true. But we also include changes from other sources. There are many
> KDE 3 maintenance projects, associated with various distributions.
>
> > >  openSUSE Factory maintainers made an error of judgement to resume including
> > >  KDE 3 packages while they demonstrably fulfil the latter 3 of our drop
> > >  criteria [2], and marketing should not join them in this.
> > >
> > >  2) The message sent by a retrograde step.  Being unique in a bad way is not
> > >  good for the project.
> I fail to see how having more users satisfied is bad. Can you elaborate this?
>
> > >  Making a thing out of including KDE 3 is saying that we
> > >  as a project invest energy in going backwards, and push (sorry) futile 
> > efforts
> > >  as features.
> > >  The set of KDE 3 users who have not yet switched to KDE 4 or to
> > >  something else is small and we are not going to win more users, more
> > >  contributors or recognition for the distro by speaking to these users' needs.
> This is very doubtful. Can you support this claim? I frequently see posts on 
> Russian
> forums from people who say they switched from other distributions to openSUSE
> just because of KDE3. For example this user says he switched from Mandriva-2008
> to openSUSE because of KDE 3:
>
> http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=ru&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Funixforum.org%2Findex.php%3Fshowtopic%3D129015

These users a still a little minority. I don´t think it´s bad or wasting 
time to support them, but you might don´t want to include it in the 
release notes, because KDE3 is out of the mainstream. And how WIll 
pointed out:

Saying we´re still supporting KDE3 in the release notes of a new product 
makes us sound like "we´re supporting everything and everyone who wants" 
Not quite bad, but in the end people could think openSUSE is a lost and 
found box for stranded projects. Sorry.

Why not writing:
"We´re supporting many desktops and window managers like KDE4, GNOME3, 
Xfce, LXDE, fluxbox and many more. Just discover it!"

I think there´s nothing wrong with supporting as many desktops as you 
can, but at some point you have to make a line and decide what the vast 
majority want to know and how they will react about it.

hope you understood me,
        --kdl

--
  -o) Kim Leyendecker
  /\\ openSUSE Ambassador, openSUSE Wiki Team DE
 _\_v http://www.opensuse.org - Linux for open minds

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