https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48611

MirosÅ‚aw Zalewski <[email protected]> changed:

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--- Comment #7 from MirosÅ‚aw Zalewski <[email protected]> ---
(See also brief summation of this issue by the end of this comment).

Petr gave rather convincing explanation of current situation, but I think there
is still room for improvement.

He said that "all the used symbols will be on newer system as well", but this
is NOT true for this particular situation. KDE4 is NOT backward compatible with
KDE3. On KDE4 system, KDE3 libraries (and integration) are of no use. And most
distributions not only ships KDE4 now, but also removed KDE3 from their
official repositories. Furthermore, some also remove Qt3 (the very foundation
of KDE3). 

To prove my point, I have checked few distributions out of DistroWatch's top 10
(not representative). I looked when did they switch to KDE4 and whether they
still provide KDE3 and Qt3 in official repositories. Results:

Ubuntu switched to KDE4 in one of 2009 releases, removed Qt3 in October 2012
(still available in 12.04 LTS version).
Debian switched to KDE4 in April 2009, removed Qt3 in May 2013 (still available
in Squeeze).
Fedora switched to KDE4 in April 2009. Qt3 is still available.
Mageia had KDE4 from very beginning, KDE3 was never available. Qt3 is still
available.
OpenSUSE switched to KDE4 in December 2008 and is one of few notable distros
still providing KDE3 in official repositories (as well as Qt3).
Arch switched to KDE in late 2008, Qt3 still available.
Gentoo switched to KDE4 in November 2009, removed Qt3 in 2010.

Qt3 (base for KDE3) has been deprecated by upstream (Trolltech at the time) in
July 2007.

This all leads to one single point - most Linux users can not install and use
KDE3 without additional work (using third-party, unsupported and potentially
insecure repositories). For them, "KDE" is synonymous to "KDE4".

Then providing only KDE3 support IS problematic. When upstream LibreOffice
package promises "kde-integration", people DO expect KDE4. They are confused by
not-so-nice integration as their distro packagers provide. They come here to
report this as bug (two of them marked as duplicate of this one).

At very least, "kde-integration" package should be renamed to
"kde3-integration". This by no means fixes the issue, but should at least
prevent some confusion.

In longer run, TDF should build packages with --with-kde4 switch.
Qt5 has been already released and KDE5 is just around a corner. We will see
gradual switch toward these in upcoming years. There is just no point in
providing KDE3 support anymore.

So, to sum up:
- LibreOffice official packages provides support for KDE3, but not KDE4.
- Most modern distributions provide KDE4 as default version of KDE. On some of
them there is no easy way to install KDE3. Also, many people are happy with
current releases of KDE4.
- This leads to confusion, as people perceive "kde-integration" as not working.
- With another major KDE transition in foreseeable future, this issue gains
importance.

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