On Tuesday 25 October 2011 03:14:31 Will Stephenson wrote: Possibly I have to respond to this. Before proceeding I just want to point out that many factual statements you made are quite doubtful.
I think you could add info on KDE3 being included in 12.1. Possibly it worth mentioning that this makes asylum for at least a part of users who dislike Gnome 3.
This is my strong objection to mentioning KDE 3 in our 12.1 marketing and release notes. SUSE has a long and undistinguished history of letting noisy tails wag the whole dog, but there is no need for the openSUSE project to continue this.
Martin Gräßlin approaches the problems facing the Trinity fork of KDE 3 in this article at freiesmagazin [1] (German), but to apply his analysis to the KDE:KDE3 packages and our distribution, and for those who don't read German or trust machine translation, my objection comes down to 2 major things.
It is amazing that people make such extensive articles with analysis of a desktop they believe have no future (as the analysis claims and tries to prove). Well, this is possibly a unique case with such extensive attack on an open-source product. 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 For example, one can arguably claim that KDE4 has no future because it will be superseded with KDE5, Gnome 3 will be superseded by Gnome 4 etc. 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 If you wish I can add more similar links. Here people praise openSUSE due to announced inclusion of KDE3 in 12.1: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ru&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux.org.ru%2Fforum%2Ftalks%2F6765214
Also it worth mentioning that openSUSE is the first distribution where KDE3 was returned back.
First and only because major distributions have a vision of where they want to go and how to invest their energy that isn't "be all things to all people, regardless".
I fail to see how going in the same direction as anyone else and repeating all others' mistakes can make someone more competitive. Anyway note that nearly all major distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Alt, Pardus) have community-supported KDE3 repositories which indicates the popular demand.
openSUSE should be a meritocracy, where things that have merit get included, instead of uncritically rewarding any activity.
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org