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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Developing applications for KDE4
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2007-01-30 6:51:45
Message-ID: 200701292351.57562.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Monday 29 January 2007 23:23, Ian Wadham wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:30 am, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > A Dilluns 29 Gener 2007, Bryan Wilkerson va escriure:
> lengthy thread on "Moving KSirc to extragear".  I am happier because,
> after 7 or 8 months, I have been able to commit my first creative change
> to my game and got into the lead paragraph in 28 Jan Commit Digest :-)

=)

> I am *not* happy because I have lost 7 months of development for no
> real gain that I can see.

as a developer of kgoldrunner, perhaps not. i wish we only had to worry about 
a subset of applications and not the collected needs presented before us.
ed

> of what appears to be "mushroom management" in this project.

sorry, i'm not familiar with this term. can you explain further?

> > How long before KDE4 makes into RH, SuSE or Ubuntu?
>
> I'd really like to know.  A few months ago a young musician from New
> York sent me a set of brilliant and extremely challenging levels for my
> game, but where and when can I publish them? 

3.5.6 that was shipped recently. well, too late now. how about 3.5.7?

> I put off releasing them 
> with KDE 3.5.5 or 3.5.6, because I believed KDE4 to be imminent ;-)

you know, i've been telling people until quite recently (e.g. the last month 
or two) for quite some time that if you are working on applications to 
continue doing so with kde3. kde4 is only now getting to a point where 
periphery application development makes sense IMHO.

> Should I give up waiting and go for 3.5.7? 

it's not either/or.

> Also I have another game 
> which I wrote nearly a year ago, as an exercise in 3D OpenGL.  Should
> I polish that up and go for a 3.5.7 release?

sure, why not? i'm not sure i get your point here.

> > > Why should someone need to have the KDE4 desktop installed
> > > in order to have a decent PDF reader?
>
> Why indeed?  What is wrong with Adobe Acrobat?  More importantly,
> why are KDE developers, who are said to be overworked and
> undermanned, writing competitors for Adobe Acrobat, OpenOffice.org,
> Firefox, GNU Cash and Xephem?  Please be assured, I am in no
> way criticising the apps themselves, just the use of valuable effort.

in each case you're missing two points, and in some cases three: 

 - we don't direct centrally who can work on what. welcome to open source.
 - the apps you mention all have limitations that are addressed by kde (and 
other) alternatives
 - some examples you give came later than the kde alternatives

adobe acrobat: slow, bloated, not embeddable, only does pdf's, enforces drm, 
people have an interest on working on kpdf.

OOo: slow (koffice has blemishes on this account too), bloated, not 
embeddable, limited in scope compared to koffice. happened long after 
koffice, which people have an interest in working on.

GNU Cash: i suppose you mean kmymoney. you do realize that that is a "3rd 
party app", right? i hope you understand we can't go around colonizing every 
project that uses kde libs and commanding them to do something else.

Xephem: don't know enough about it to comment.

> Qt has list-processing classes ... but wait! ... Qt has re-defined those
> classes several times in the last few years, necessitating repeated
> changes in every application that uses them, including mine.  It's

erm. they changed with Qt 4.0. so i count that as "once". how do you 
count "several times"?

> Keeping up with the incessant changes that occur in Qt and KDE
> libraries is (humorously?) known as "maintenance" and failure to
> keep up with them is punishable by death (of application).  Real software

yes, so all those hours i put in porting literally millions of lines of code 
for every change i made in kdelibs was what? and my efforts pale in 
comparison to those of people like montel, faure and others. we've done as 
best we can to do the work for you; deprecated calls still exist as do usages 
of kde3support ... which is yet more work we've taken upon ourselves to ease 
transition.

as for the "punishable by death" statement, what is "punishable by death" is 
an app that isn't maintained for which there are quality alternatives. 
weren't you going on about not reinventing wheels and wasting effort earlier?

as a counter example, we're hanging on to krfb/krdc because they are important 
and have no viable alternatives right now ... in spite of the maintenance of 
them in dubious states right now.

> example of the latter).  Only rarely have I had to spend much time
> accommodating changes in the programming platform, even as a
> software support person, but now I find that it is an overhead of as
> much as 40% of all the work I do in KDE.

perhaps our fault wasn't telling people such as yourself quite clear enough 
not to start working on your apps a year ago. i tried to voice this and 
thought i could rely on the release leadership we had in previous years; that 
release leadership essentially went away and nobody really stepped up to fill 
that gap. we're addressing that now, albeit later than we should have. i 
won't even speak of my disappointment in those who complain and did nothing.

> the point, I do not feel that I will ever progress further and offer all
> that I believe I can offer to the KDE community, such as working on
> more serious applications.

is this dramatism or do you really feel this way? (serious question)

> On the other, if all the talent in KDE and Trolltech could put its heads
> together to come up with some *stable* core libraries, I am sure there
> would be a quantum leap in Open Source application development,
> to say nothing of greater acceptance for Linux and Open Source in
> the marketplace.  We might even have apps that could run on several
> successive versions of the KDE Desktop.

the "if only you would then ..."

s,you,we,g

> Is that too much to ask? 

what do you think?

> But then (depressing thought) maybe application developers in KDE
> *like* doing "maintenance" caused by changes in KDE or Qt ... :-(

it's not depressing, it's rediculous.

i'm tired of this negative crap with people lolling their heads about 
going "oh woe is me". look around you ( the royal "you", everyone reading 
this). go look at what okular, ligature, ksysguard, kdegames and others have 
accomplished with kde4. seriously look at the frameworks improvements that 
have gone into it. if you wish to dismiss the successful work of others, then 
please do so into /dev/null.

i'm all ears for rational and constructive criticism, but the current fad of 
negativity is more than i can bear, and i suspect i'm not the only one. it's 
dragging me down.

so .. frustrated? great! express that in terms of solutions.

feeling like hi-jacking a thread on kde-devel to do little else than poison 
the spirits of others who actually happen to be making nice progress? take a 
walk in the fresh air and come back when the feeling has passed.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)

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