[gentoo-desktop] Kde 3 Future/Status

[Tomáš Chvátal]

Hello guys,
With this e-mail I hope to convince a few of you to step up and help us 
maintain kde3 packages. But first things first, current state:

kde-base/*:3.5 packages
The kde-base/ packages are fixed, living happy side by side with KDE4, no 
issues should be present now - with the following exceptions.
PROBLEMS:
The KDE project (upstream) mostly stopped working on KDE-3.5 around 2 years 
ago and has since dropped any support for that branch of KDE. As such, no one 
is auditing the code or fixing bugs caused by updates of deps and Gentoo is 
unable to track security patches and to fix issues related to updates in deps 
such as gcc or glibc. Also, almost all kde3 packages will fail with new 
autotools (autoconf-2.64) (so far masked), and they will require quite a few 
patches to fix KDE autotools stuff (admin/ files).

*/*:3.5 packages based on kde3 eclasses
These are KDE3 packages migrated to the new slot and cleaned (should be arts 
free too). In these everything is nice, shiny and prepared, they live nicely 
side by side with KDE4. Any recent version bumps, if it were the case, 
happened quite simply to polish a package.
PROBLEM: these packages represent a minority in the tree.

*/*:* packages based/needing kde3 eclasses
These are packages that are not yet fixed/tested and with high probability 
will fail with kde4 around.
PROBLEMS:
There is an horrible mess in kde3 apps slotting (when cleaning :4 and :3.5 are 
used).
They might want arts, if mandatory then it will be killed if optionaly then 
option should be disabled.
They might detect their directory variables during configure phase incorrectly 
and pick kde4.
They usualy need EAPI2 and have not been converted to it yet.
There is a large number of such packages (the changes themselves are simple, 
and require little testing, but there are tons of such crap around).

The major problem of all of the above is that there's no one in the KDE team 
really using kde3 or its packages.

So what were after is finding some people still interested in KDE3 and KDE3 
packages that are willing to step up and contact me/jmbsvicetto about joining 
kde team. If you are a dev then it is simple, we have nice policy so anyone 
can join. If you are staffer, than we will help you to get your end-quiz done 
and rocking ;] and last but not least if you are power user we are willing to 
help you to became gentoo-dev.

Please act now because the longer it takes the worse it'll be. We're getting 
very close to the point it becomes a global nightmare and where the easiest 
approach will be to punt KDE-3.5 out.

Cheers

--------
Tomáš Chvátal
Gentoo Linux Developer [KDE/Overlays/Sunrise/X11]
E-Mail          : scarabeus@g.o
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