On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Cornelius Schumacher
<schumacher@kde.org> wrote:
On Thursday 28 October 2010 John Layt wrote:
>
> Big questions. Anyone with big answers? :-)
Here is a big answer:
Let's merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let's put all KDE libraries,
support libraries, platform modules into Qt, remove the redundancies in Qt,
and polish it into one nice consistent set of APIs, providing both, the
wonderful KDE integration, consistency and convenience, as well as the
simplicity and portability of the Qt platform.
I know what you think ("madness", "no", "KDE 5", "impossible", "governance",
"binary compatibility", "Nokia", "impossible", ...), but if you put that aside
for a while and think big, wouldn't that be a wonderful answer to all the
struggles we have with kdelibs?
We all love Qt, without it KDE wouldn't exist. We also love the KDE
development platform, it provides all that what Qt doesn't have or didn't have
at some point in time. But is there still a real reason to keep them separate?
Wouldn't it be much more elegant, if you wouldn't have to decide, if to use
some KDE classes or write a "qt-only" application, if you would get all the
wonders of KDE from Qt in one consistent way?
Sorry for butting in, but I just have to ask: Do you basically mean that the
"KDE Development Platform" cease to be "KDE" and become part of Qt?
Let's say this were possible, would KDE (or marketing-compliant, KDE SC) then
become simply apps using Qt, probably with tighter platform integration on,
for example, Linux?
I mean, the thread started out as "why kdelibs?". With the answer you offered,
the question in my mind now becomes "why KDE at all?" Or "what would KDE's
selling/differentiating factor be?
I hope I don't come off as trolling or offensive. I'm just genuinely curious about
the effects of such a future with regards to KDE's independent identity.