2009/11/4 Dale <[email protected]>: > We have been having a discussion on the KDE mailing list over the last > few days and a couple of us Gentoo users have "issues". KDE 4 is just > not ready quite yet. I firmly believe it will be in the next few months > and with each upgrade it gets better. As I wrote on the KDE list a > short time ago, some of us feel that we are having KDE 4 forced on us > when it is not ready just because KDE 3.5 is not being maintained. I'm > not pointing at Gentoo here because this appears to be coming from > upstream. Gentoo can't provide packages when upstream is not updating. > > What my point, and the point from others is, we need KDE 3.5 to be in > the tree until at least KDE 4.4 or even better KDE 4.5 is released. I > have faith that KDE 4 will be ready and fully usable by that point. > Surely this can be done somehow. If not, KDE needs to rethink how they > do this next time so that it can. It's not like KDE is new on the block. > > Just to be clear, I don't think this is a Gentoo problem but a problem > with how KDE is handling the releases. It sounds like KDE has dropped > the ball on KDE 3.5 a little bit early. I'm not a dev so I could be > wrong here.
I agree with you that KDE4 is not yet up to the standards of stability and usability we are used to in KDE3. However, both KDE and Qt upstream have de facto dropped support for their respective version 3. This means nobody is looking at security issues for those old versions. We cannot be expected to do that job for them, and do not want to maintain versions no longer supported upstream with possibly unknown security bugs. As you say, it is indeed an upstream problem, which forces our hand. But to extend a hand to those users who want to stick with the old versions and are willing to take possible security risks, we have started the kde3 overlay. And we are happy to help "lowly" users like you to get the skills to co-maintain those packages in the overlay. As it is now, we have no Gentoo developer who is committed to maintain both Qt3 and KDE3, and we feel it is irresponsible to leave those unmaintained in the tree. Cheers, -- Ben de Groot Gentoo Linux developer (qt, media, lxde, desktop-misc) ______________________________________________________
