From quanta Wed Jan 23 08:31:44 2008 From: Eric Laffoon Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:31:44 +0000 To: quanta Subject: Re: [Quanta] Status of Quanta and KDE 4 Message-Id: <200801230031.44316.sequitur () kde ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=quanta&m=120107843004888 On Monday 21 January 2008 12:17 pm, Mark Ziegler wrote: > Hello list, > > can you please give a small overview about quanta (kwebdev) and its > progress on the way to kde 4? There isn't a lot of news at the moment or we would have posted it. Progress is being made, but it's a huge task. The KDevelop platform which Quanta will be based on appears to be in place, but note that KDevelop is also nowhere near ready for KDE 4. These are both large and complex applications, but they have several developers and we have Andras and not much else. Of course Andras is as good as any 10 developers some days. ;) > > Until today I don't get any packages for my opensuse 10.3 box. Yeah? Did you get the full desktop and settings dialogs for KDE4 yet. Hey, I love KDE and I think KDE4 looks hot. Having said that, it's atypical that so much of KDE is not being delivered. I started using KDE at 1.1.2 and I don't remember KDE2 and KDE3 arriving like this. I'm sure it will be wonderful soon, but Andras is running it and lost a day fixing bugs in kdelibs. I don't think there is anything wrong with using a stable package that works great if the really shiny one may put your forehead through the screen until the kinks are out. > Will it be ready for kde 4.1? I hope so, but frankly I'm a lot more interested in developing a really great package that's more than just a quick and dirty port. We could have done that already, but then why upgrade? In fact you can run KDE3 apps just fine in KDE4. I think doing it right is more important than doing it just because. We are finally at the point we can look at more specific goals. KDE4 wasn't even stable a few short months ago... That means writing code can be walking up a hill made of sand. Developers burn out less when they don't have to cover the same ground so many times to get to where they are going. > Or is opensuse not ready with packages? > Will there be a kde 4 release of quanta? Hah! When KDE3 was released Quanta had not been in development for a while. It was around 3.1 we ported and we joined the official KDE release packages and schedule at 3.1. Until then the concensus on the web gossip was we were dead. Quanta is now in it's 8th year and has one the last 3 LinuxQuestions.org members' choice awards. It will probably win again next month. Start the rumor. We're dead. Of course it won't matter because application develop is our passion and we use our own tools regularly... so we just tune out rumors of our death and wait for the praise. To quote Mark Twain, "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated". > > Any information is appreciated! > > Cheers, > Mark And there you are. As it happens Andras has been burned out on months of less than gratifying struggle porting to KDE4 where he was walking up the sand hill. So for the last week he has been relaxing by helping me with Kommander. I will post on that here shortly, but if you're not familiar you would not recognize what Kommander is becoming. I had a wish list I thought would take several months, with the idea if we could just do some of it we could have a good interim tool while we looked for help to port it to KDE4. Andras did most of that list in a week and is finishing up this week, as well as adding some things I hadn't thought of and doing some things I thought would likely never happen. In short, what I was told was next to impossible he did in next to no time. I guess 5.5 years full time developing on KDE can make a good programmer into one who can part the Red Sea before breakfast without breaking a sweat. I hope to be making a release of Kommander soon, and it is a great way to extend Quanta. In fact you can make Quanta into a whole new application using scripts, Kommander and some creativity. It's the most extensible tool I've even used. I'm betting you probably don't know half of what it does... nothing personal, but if you want something new look at project actions and Kommander... We will be doing a fund raiser when we release Kommander shortly. It's important to note that Andras' situation is changing. Now Romainia is part of the EU. The economy has changed there, and I have been paying in dollars, which is losing to Euros at a depressing rate. He also has a child now. He needs a raise, and I doubt anyone besides me fully comprehends his value and ability. I refered to last week as the code storm. As fast as I could pull SVN, build on my dual AMD64 with 2 gigs RAM and test I was seeing another commit with new functionality I'd been wanting for years. I know I recently posted asking for help here and got some, so I'm not going to make a big deal of it, but if you want to see something really exciting there is nothing like making sure Andras is well taken care of. He really is impossible to replace, without having several really skilled guys who work well together anyway. I hope this helps answer your question. -- Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader http://quanta.kdewebdev.org _______________________________________________ Quanta mailing list Quanta@mail.kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/quanta