KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt 196
An anonymous reader writes "A proposal has been brought up with KDE developers by Cornelius Schumacher to merge the KDE libraries with the upstream Qt project. This could potentially lead to KDE5 coming about sooner than anticipated, but there's very mixed views on whether merging kdelibs with Qt would actually be beneficial to the KDE project, which has already led to two lengthy mailing list talks (the first and second threads). What do you think?"
Re:GPL vs. assignment? (Score:4, Informative)
KDElibs is LGPL and has always been LGPL, common libraries in KDE have always been required to be LGPL so that they could be used by "unfree software" (as you write). Only KDE applications are usually GPL to protect themselves better.
Re:God no (Score:3, Informative)
Phonon is one example. Another brought up in the discussion was QPrinter vs KPrinter, though that has an entirely different background. With QPrinter, KDE was forced to make a suboptimal decision because KPrinter had no maintainer and it seemed unlikely to be even get ported to Qt4, let alone well integrated, before KDE4 was to be released.
3 phases of software (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, there's three phases of software:
1. Software that's in development. Sure, there's bad decisions made, but at least things are changing. After a decade of neglect, Windows seems to be back in development mode. KDE is definitely in development mode. Developers love this, because nothing has to be "finished" or "bug free." Everything can be a quickly hacked-together proof of concept.
2. Software that's in support mode. Almost nothing happens, except for a few patches. Mac OS X seems to be in support mode these days, same with Gnome. Support mode is actually a good thing for users who are used to the product, but developers will get bored.
3. Software that's dead. No patches, the developers abandoned the project. Eventually the users will disappear as well.
Re:What about Qt? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:KDE desperate ? (Score:3, Informative)
You got that completely wrong. The reason there's Gnome stuff in Meego and not KDE stuff is because Meego is a merge of 2 older distributions that used Gnome stuff by default. They only added Qt because Nokia bought it in the mean time.
Re:KDE desperate ? (Score:3, Informative)
Stop spreading lies. Nokia takes lots of KDE to MeeGo and helps KDE a lot. KDE also uses GLib in many places.
MeeGo IVI is not based on Clutter. It uses Qt. See http://meego.gitorious.com/meego-ivi-ux/ivihome/blobs/master/launcher.cpp [gitorious.com]
MeeGo Netbook uses Clutter because it's just the continuation of the older Moblin GUI which was based on Clutter and Intel found it pointless to rewrite it.
Nokia is probably the biggest (at least one of the biggest) corporate sponsor of KDE -- for example Aaron Seigo in employed by Nokia just to work on KDE. Nokia brought KOffice to Maemo/MeeGo, sponsoring a smartphone GUI, improve file format converters, etc.
MeeGo Handset will also use KCal for example.
Nobody at KDE is getting desperate. The "merger" is just an idea by a single guy and nothing KDE as a whole is actively pursuing. Considering how many of KDE are against that idea, I don't see how it could become reality.
KDE is one of the healthiest FOSS projects of all. According to Wikipedia KDE is the 2nd largest FOSS project after the Linux kernel.
KDE has no reason to be desperate. Even if MeeGo was only using Qt and no KDE code at all, GNOME still got the boot while a KDE-related technology (Qt) got in. Some back-end services remain but everything related to GUIs was deprecated. Even MeeGo Netbook uses "Mx" as its toolkit, not GTK (though some applications still use GTK). And now GNOME is in the middle of the Shell vs. Unity battle with the weird result that now even Canonical is a bigger contributor to KDE than GNOME even though their "GNOME distribution" is the premier one.
No, KDE is healthy and not at all desperate.
(PS: My post may seem anti-GNOME but it's not meant that way. GNOME is a large community that will survive current events and probably become even stronger after their platform was renovated with their 3.0 release.)
Re:Focus on the now. (Score:3, Informative)
KDE SC 4.5+ is a lot more stable than earlier releases. It was good enough for me to switch back from gnome (I switched to gnome a year or 2 ago due to KDE's instability).
To all those who think gnome is great and kde is unusable...well, gnome is great, I'll admit that...but with KDE so many apps have tabbed interfaces and for my work that means a lot less windows open and I can group similar tasks together. It makes a world of difference to productivity. Also mulit-monitor support is much nicer - I can have panels on any screen I want, exactly where I put them.
GNOME isn't bad, but it lacks features. KDE SC 4.5 is pretty darn stable for me...using kubuntu 10.10 right now.
Re:Quanta? (Score:4, Informative)
You do realise that the guys writing kdelibs aren't the same ones who'll be working on Quanta, right? Quanta should be the domain of the kdevelop/kdewebdev guys, not the kdelibs/kdebase guys.
Re:KDE needs some competition. (Score:4, Informative)
What's actually wrong with Gnome?
I love it. It's not changed massively in the last few years, true, but I don't really get why it should. It works, it looks fine, it's pretty responsive and light enough for general use....
Re:Quanta? (Score:3, Informative)
I changed to xfce recently after trying KDE 4.x for the 2nd time after 12 months (debian lenny to squeeze). The first time, I backed out of my upgrade. The second time, I took a friend's advice and switched to xfce. It's more stable than KDE (kdm locked up my screen twice in a day), much faster, and things mostly work the way I expect.
Re:Oh, hey, look -- (Score:1, Informative)
KDE3 has been forked, have a look at http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/ [pearsoncomputing.net]
Re:KDE needs some competition. (Score:2, Informative)
Why do so many programmers are still unaware of Bash's string-parsing built-in capabilities,
and prefer to use the 'basename' command instead?
For the above renaming one would suffice to type:
mv $f ${f%.*}.jpg
See: http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Shell-Parameter-Expansion [gnu.org]
Re:KDE needs some competition. (Score:3, Informative)
Why do so many programmers are still unaware of Bash's string-parsing built-in capabilities,
and prefer to use the 'basename' command instead?
Why do so many 2nd generation Linux users presume that everyone uses bash?
Keep script snippets bourne shell and POSIX compatible, especially when posted to the public, so anyone can copy/paste them into the shell they use. Even if they use bash.
For this example, it's far from unthinkable that it would be run on a mediacenter appliance, most of which don't have bash (embedded tends to use busybox), but do have ImageMagick.