A Dijous, 29 de setembre de 2011, Kevin Kofler vàreu escriure: > Hi, > > as you probably already know, a decision was recently made that kdelibs 4.7 > would be the last 4.x release series of kdelibs, and work would be ongoing > in the 5.0 (frameworks) and 4.7 (KDE/4.7) branches only. I think this is a > huge mistake, for several reasons (the "TL/DR" crowd can stop right here, > but if you want to know why, please read on!): > > 1. This puts kdelibs 4 into maintenance mode even before KDE Frameworks 5 is > anywhere near a release, let alone versions of the workspace and > applications actually using it. As a result, we will fail to deliver new > features to our end users for months if not years. And no, kdelibs features > do not only target developers: Some application or workspace features > require kdelibs changes, or in some cases, even consist of kdelibs changes > only, e.g. my Plasma PackageKit integration work is entirely in kdelibs > (libplasma).
Please describe the features you need. > 3. Libraries, due to their nature, have a much longer shelf life than the > workspace or applications. In order to keep existing applications working, > distributions ship old (sometimes very old) libraries as compatibility > libraries. For example, Fedora was probably the first distribution to drop > the KDE 3 workspace, but we STILL ship the KDE 3 libraries! And we have no > plans to drop them at this time. And RHEL is supporting them until at least > 2017 (the scheduled end of life for RHEL 6). Fedora also still ships GTK+ > 1. So it is just totally backwards to stop developing the libraries before > the workspace and the applications. In fact, it should be just the > opposite: We should continue doing kdelibs 4.x releases even after the rest > of KDE SC has moved on to 5.x! And bugfix releases alone don't cut it: For > consistency between old and new applications, some features should be > backported to the compatibility libraries as well. For example, when we > switched our default spell checker in Fedora from aspell to hunspell in > Fedora 9 (i.e. 4.0 era), I had to add support for hunspell to kdelibs3, or > our users would have had to install 2 spell checkers to use KDE apps! (Even > several apps in the default KDE installation hadn't been ported to kdelibs4 > yet in Fedora 9.) That change never got upstreamed because kdelibs3 is no > longer maintained, yet it would have been useful to many distributions. > Please keep the life cycle of your software for distributors and end users > in mind when you decide your schedules, not just the convenience of a few > core developers. What you are describing is actually fine means that "old unmaintained" libraries are still useful, so I do not see that it helps to prove your point. > So I am urging you to reconsider your decision and reopen master for those > people willing to work on 4.8. It's not too late yet, there's a month left > until the soft feature freeze for KDE SC 4.8. > > Kevin Kofler
