Frameworks 5: KDE Libraries Reworked Into Portable Qt Modules

jrepin writes "The KDE libraries are being methodically reworked into a set of cross platform modules that will be readily available to all Qt developers. The KDE Frameworks, designed as drop-in Qt Addons, will enrich Qt as a development environment with functions that simplify, accelerate and reduce the cost of Qt development. For example, KArchive (one of the first Frameworks available) offers support for many popular compression codecs in a self-contained and easy-to-use file archiving library. Just feed it files; there's no need to reinvent an archiving function." This is a pretty major thing: "The introduction of Qt's Open Governance model in late 2011 offered the opportunity for KDE developers to get more closely involved with Qt, KDE's most important upstream resource. ... These contributions to Qt form the basis for further modularization of the KDE libraries. The libraries are moving from being a singular 'platform' to a set of 'Frameworks'. ... Instead it is a comprehensive set of technologies that becomes available to the whole Qt ecosystem." The new KDE Frameworks will be layered as three tiers of components, with each tier consisting of three semi-independent groups of libraries (the article explains the category/tier dependencies; it's a bit hairy for a quick summary). A dashboard shows the status of each component.

Re:The enigma

[bill_mcgonigle]

But why then is the KDE user experience so awful??

Many of their defaults have very poor usability. The project has to be willing to listen to people who have HCI training who are not C++ developers for this to get fixed.

Two small examples: 1) hiding the cursor when it's over a text field that's being typed in. 2) allowing for pure alphabetical sorting in file dialogs (not by-inode-type, then alphabetical). Both of these have long-standing bug reports in KDE and are the kind of "little things" that drive people crazy. ... Does anyone actually use it?

Yeah, millions. They probably waste a huge amount of time switching defaults. I switched away from GNOME when they started to embrace mono - I felt my bug reporting efforts were better used on something not-GNOME that would eventually be the most popular desktop. It's still not here yet, but the direction is still good.

Isn't Qt a GUI library?

[Laxori666]

I'm really not trying to flamebait here, but I thought Qt was a GUI library. Why does a GUI library need a "self-contained and easy-to-use file archiving library"? Isn't that something totally separate?