KDE4 and the KDEHOME problem

[Kevin Krammer]

Hi there,

Sune asked me to state my opinion regarding this issue.

I am in favor of keeping the upstream default, $HOME/.kde

This is what application developers assume and has therefore the highest 
chance of doing what the users expect.

KDE3 -> KDE4 is the most common scenario, be it now or at the Lenny ->Squeeze 
transition.

There is a good chance that neither configs nor data of applications has 
changed at all making an application upgrade similar to a 3.x -> 3.x+1 move.

Copying .kde to .kde4 at the first KDE start assumes that this is actually 
possible in terms of disk space. People with recent clean installation of 
KDE3 can have quite some quantities of data in .kde, e.g. mails.

That approach also has the problem of relying on startkde being used or some 
lowlevel KDE code being patched (libs or runtime services like kdeinit4, 
kded).

Of course the downside is that it potentially removes "the way back" for 
people who find they don't like KDE4 (yet).
But since we are mainly talking about unstable users here, what are the 
chances that they don't have backups or do upgrades without checking how it 
would affect their system (which packages would get removed, etc).

Addtionallly. Debian is unvoluntarily in the fortunate situation that it 
didn't ship earlier KDE4 release which quite often got rejected.
The number of reports of people downgrading from 4.2 have been significantly 
lower.

Cheers,
Kevin

P.S.: I am now also subscribed, so no need to CC me

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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