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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Idea: KDE3 to KDE4 Settings migration wizard
From:       "AJ Venter" <AJ.Venter () datacash ! co ! za>
Date:       2008-07-16 20:32:05
Message-ID: 6D3DB03C7B43164AA4BF76875F15875F16B67678 () c3po ! mercantrade ! com
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Hi all,
I have an idea, based on my personal experience - I am happy to give it
a go though I am no C++ developer (but this could probably be done with
something like Kommander or even bash+kdialog) but before I tried I
wanted to get a feel for how others feel about it - and whether it has
any feasibility.

To me, KDE4.0 was not at a point where I could use it for my daily
desktop - my nvidia card had a lot to do with this, but there were other
issues - most of them discussed beyond believe. KDE4.1 seems like it
will be pretty close though.

So, up until now, I have had both versions of KDE installed, using KDE3
for day-to-day work and experimenting with KDE4.

Eventually of course, I will want to migrate to KDE4 completely but a
lot of people will be moving across after a time of running both I
believe. The single most difficult aspect of this I think is that you
end up with a complete blank slate. Every setting you did in the past is
lost -even where such settings are not in any version dependent. I am
thinking of things like your Amarok songs database, your kopete accounts
and chat histories and the like.

So the idea occurred to me that one could probably create a wizard that
knew which settings were safe to migrate and could automate it. It could
ask the user where his old .kde data directory is, and where the new
KDE4 one will be (as this varies greatly between distro's and users own
migration paths), then copy all settings which are safe to copy from the
one to the other. 
Mostly these are just plain text files being copied from one share/apps
and share/config to another. 
Like I said, I would be happy to try and create it but I will certainly
need help - not least to know which config files are safe to copy
across. 

Of course, this may be superfluous - my next question is, how safe is it
to copy your entire kde3 data directory to where you will want the new
kde4 directory to be prior to logging in the first time ? I actually
couldn't find this on the net easily. How well will KDE4 recognize which
configs it cannot keep using, which it knows how to import and which to
discard ? 
If the answer is "very well" then this problem can be addressed by
merely telling this to people, rather than writing a new program
(however simple it may be in code).

So I away replies eagerly and if the answer to the last question is
"don't even think about it" then I think my first SOFTWARE contribution
to KDE just got decided :p

Ciao
A.J. 

-- 
AJ Venter
Linux System Administrator
DataCash

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