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 For example, one can arguably claim that KDE4 has no future because it will be superseded with KDE5, Gnome 3 will be superseded by Gnome 4 etc.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:
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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org