[gentoo-desktop] Re: kde-sunset: Calling base_src_prepare from kde.eclass

[Duncan]

Andrew John Hughes posted on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:58:46 +0000 as excerpted:

> I've managed to rebuild most of KDE 3.5 against the new jpeg-8 library
> using the overlay.  Many thanks for maintaining it!
>
> I think the removal from the main tree is premature.  Not only is KDE 4
> still an unstable resource hog, but the KOffice developers explicitly
> state that 2.1:
>
> 'is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions
> to package it as the default office suite yet.'
>
> http://www.koffice.org/news/koffice-2-1-released/
>
> Whoever removed it from the main tree has completely ignored this and
> decided to ship an incomplete office suite to users for the own
> convenience.

FWIW, I agree that it's premature, but it's not Gentoo's problem so much 
as KDE's and Qt Software's, as both kde3 and qt3 are unsupported upstream, 
thus, subject to security vulns, getting increasingly difficult to 
maintain in the face of continuing system updates, etc.  Why KDE refuses 
to support the previous stable version until the new version is generally 
stable as well, I don't know, but they don't.  (Qt I can see a bit more, 
as they're a commercial company, now part of Nokia, and supporting older 
versions costs real money.  It wasn't their fault that kde decided to go 
for a full rewrite instead of a straight upgrade port, /then/ do the 
rewrite when they have an existing stable kde based on a qt that's going 
to be supported for awhile.)

FWIW, I've been quite pleased with kde 4.4.  The upgrade from 3.x is still 
likely to be a big nightmare for many, as so many things have changed and 
there's some areas that other non-kde-core solutions will have to be used 
instead, but that's to be expected with an upgrade of that size. I had 
predicted with early 4.3 that based on evident rate of progress, 4.3 was 
the first one I could in good conscience call late beta quality, and 4.4 
should be rc quality with 4.5 hopefully finally reaching release quality.  
4.4 has certainly met at least that prediction, here, and to my very 
pleasant surprise, exceeded it to the point where I'm very nearly ready to 
call it full release quality, the only things keeping me from doing so is 
that I don't have all of kde installed, and haven't tested in 4.4 all of 
what I do have installed, and the caution from having been burned so many 
times previously by kde4.  But kde's official position was that 4.2 was 
ready for normal users, and that was terribly sad, because all it did was 
demonstrate how terribly out of touch with reality they were.

Well, there's still one bug that could be a show-stopper.  konqueror (and 
all of KDE) SSL and certificate support and management isn't yet up to 
what I'd call normal usable standards (it works in general, but the cert 
management familiar to kde3 users is missing, with the result being that 
it's broken on some sites with more exotic certificates -- good SSL and 
certificate management is absolutely critical in this day and age when 
many banking transactions and purchases are via web browser!).  But 
realistically, konqueror as a web browser is falling behind and looking to 
be replaced by the webkit based rekonq browser after it matures a bit 
more, enough so that few people use konqueror as their main browser any 
more anyway, with chrome/chromium and firefox/iceweasel/icecat being the 
major browsers picking up from konqueror, so this isn't the blocker it 
could have been as there's honestly not that many people, even among kde 
devs I gather, using konqueror as their primary browser anyway.  But that 
same support is used in a few other areas in kde as well, and it continues 
to be problematic there.

Then of course as you mentioned, there's koffice.  Just as it's really not 
qt's fault that kde took so long to stabilize on a reasonably current 
version, it's not so much kde-core's fault that koffice isn't yet properly 
stable on kde4.

The same applies to other apps built on kde, such as k3b, possibly amarok 
(which was bad enough, especially for amd64 users, that I got fed up and 
switched to something else, thus the "possibly" as I don't know current 
status), kaffeine, etc.  But the k3b live version (ebuild available in the 
kde overlay) is actually quite good, as I mentioned I gave up on amarok as 
it never was a real good fit for me, and I found the very good qt4 based 
smplayer to replace kaffeine, so the status on those isn't too bad.  But 
koffice... that remains a legitimate blocker, for those dependent on it 
for their workflow.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman