The next thrilling episode of "KDE version in Lenny: KDE 3.5.9 vs KDE 4.1"
Matthew Rosewarne
mrosewarne at inoutbox.com
Mon Jun 9 23:06:38 UTC 2008
{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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