{Backstory: I've been away from every sort of hacking for a few months now,
but very soon will be able to devote some real time again. Meanwhile, I've
tried (not always successfully) to keep quiet about concerns I wasn't
actually helping to solve.}While there are valid concerns with matters of missing features or obsolescence, I see the two greatest issues in this decision being maintainability and (wo)manpower. While there are certainly other reasons to release with 4.1, those are the two issues I see as being critical, since they ultimately decide the viability of having KDE in Debian. By maintainability, I'm primarily referring to the lack of upstream maintenance of the KDE 3 branch. For example, there are libraries used by KDE 3 that have changed API, but the KDE 3 code has not been updated to build with the newer version. Should there be another unexpected breakage, such as the one caused by Flash Player, upstream will be entirely uninterested in resolving it. Any bugs in KDE 3 not related to packaging will be largely unfixable. The deeper issue, though, is one of developer time and effort. By choosing to include KDE3 as the primary desktop in Debian, the Debian maintainers are effectively the new upstream. Considering the existing scarcity of developer time, in addition to post-release work on KDE 4, there is simply not enough time for the Debian KDE team to provide the quality of maintenance that people expect from a Debian release. On a related note, since there is no doubt whatsoever that lenny+1 will use some form of KDE 4, that work will have to be done regardless of what is released with lenny. The amount of additional work needed to also revive KDE 3 serves as an unnecessary burden on an already busy team. The packaging of KDE 4.1 is already mostly complete and has received about as much testing as anything in experimental is going to get. Other distributions, such as Fedora, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu, have all accomplished to release with a KDE 4 desktop while still providing the KDE 3 applications that do not yet have a KDE 4 equivalent. Considering how for we have already come, I see little reason why that would not be possible for Debian.
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