Uploads to lenny and the $KDEHOME dilemma

[Pino Toscano]

Hi,

> The question is now: should we
> a) continue to use ~/.kde4 for KDE 4 applications
> b) use ~/.kde for KDE 4 applications.

My choice would go for b), ie using ~/.kde even in KDE 4.

Users that will upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze expect their data & 
configuration to be preserved and used as they did them.
A new KDEHOME could be nice if you want to start from scratch, but not really 
if you had lot of settings in your ~/.kde.

> The problem with a) is, that as mentioned no data is is moved to KDE 4.

Exactly, and users don't know that copying stuff anually should be working 
anyway, and then they report bugs[1] for each application asking for 
migration procedures, or for "global migration wizards".

> The problem with b) is, that we don't know for sure, if all upgrade scripts
> work and users don't loose critical data.

Upgrading is something that must be supported by any KDE application, either 
by adapting the old configuration to a new format (kconf_update), or just by 
simply discarding the old one. But they should not misbehave because of old 
configuration/data; and if they don't, it is a bug to be reported ASAP to us 
(KDE). (Given that Squeeze will ship with at least KDE 4.4, if not greater, 
there's time to solve these problems as they are reported.)

> Apart from that users already using KDE 4 won't find their settings copied.
> (Add here more pros and cons for either option.)

It all goes down to which "current KDE 4 users" should be supported, ie 
current Lenny users (ktorrent and okular) or experimental too.

> To overcome this, we had the following idea in IRC: Provide a little Qt
> application which starts at the first KDE 4 start and allows the users to
> copy their KDEHOMEs around.

kpersonalizer strikes again? :-P

> In case we would use ~/.kde for KDE 4 the script could offer to create a
> backup in ~/.kde3 so lost data can be reverted if anything goes wrong.
> If we continue to use ~/.kde4 the application could offer to copy ~/.kde to
> ~/.kde4.
> Non-KDE users are a bit lost here, we could document what to copy where.

As Kevin said already, this can create the problem of the disk space; other 
than that, what you decide what is worth copying or not?
For example, I have a session with ~2-3 konqueror windows with a few tabs in 
each, and I would not like to lose it. Or also configurations of "smaller" 
KDE applications, let it be kate, rsibreak or a KDE-Edu application. Sure, 
not a big deal in configuring them again, but can be a small annoyance too.

[1] a quick search on bugzilla gives me:
#157367, #163771, #167276, #167374, #169827, #181210, and probably there's a 
couple more.

-- 
Pino Toscano
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