[gentoo-desktop] Re: Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay

[Duncan]

Alex Alexander posted on Fri, 05 Jul 2013 01:02:24 +0300 as excerpted:

> Being part of the team that decided to remove KDE3 from the tree, I
> assure you that it wasn't an easy decision. Unfortunately, KDE3 was in
> really bad shape. Upstream had abandoned it, build tools slowly became
> incompatible with it and maintaining it became a big PITA for the KDE
> team.
>
> A lot of work had been put into making KDE3 and KDE4 co-exist already,
> since we too felt that KDE4 was not ready and I'm pretty sure we kept it
> around longer than most distros out there.
>
> But at some point KDE4 became usable and we had to move on, for our own
> sanity.

Thanks.

FWIW, I agree.  It was really upstream that dropped the ball on that one, 
especially after ASeigo's (in)famous promise.  Both distros and users 
were left to pick up the pieces on their own.

As for the timing, by the time kde3 actually headed to sunset, I had been 
switched over for a couple months (maybe a bit more?) already, as I had 
seen the gentoo/kde discussion and knew they were dropping it... with 
little real choice given upstream kde had already dropped it, and by 4.2, 
was claiming kde4 was ready for ordinary users despite it being horribly 
broken alpha quality at best.

And it's a good thing I /did/ get a relatively early start, since even 
tho I had been trying kde4 on and off since before its initial release, 
it was simply still to broken to switch to directly, without a *LOT* of 
tweaking and substitution of alternative options where there simply 
wasn't a kde4 option yet (and in some cases still isn't, proper khotkeys 
multi-key support being a case in point, but I ended up hacking together 
a solution that worked for me).  I actually switched with 4.2.5, but it 
took me well over a hundred hours (that's when I stopped counting, and I 
was being conservative) of stress and sweat to complete the transition.  
Obviously, few would tolerate that, so it was still broken (alpha) by 
definition.

Late in 4.5, say 4.5.4 or so, was the first version I considered truly 
first-release quality, and that would have been a *LONG* time for a distro 
to try to support kde3 without upstream itself helping.  I guess Debian 
stable effectively did that, but Debian stable isn't a rolling distro and 
wasn't constantly upgrading the rest of the distribution out from 
underneath the stale kde3, breaking it in the process, either.  (Of 
course, just when everything else was settling down, the kdepim devs had 
to repeat pretty much the same story with akonadified kmail, in kdepim-4.6
+... the MIDDLE of what SHOULD have been a a stable-api series!  Anyone 
sane would have reserved that for the 4.x -> 5.x transition, but that's a 
whole different story.  OTOH, it was that which finally triggered my 
switch off kmail/akonadi/kdepim entirely, and with that gone I no longer 
had a reason to keep semantic-desktop on, so that's when I killed it here 
too, thus setting the stage for this entire thread...)


On the bright side, tho, at least here all that work you put into making 
kde3 and kde4 coexist reasonably peacefully was definitely NOT a waste.  
It was that work, after all, that finally allowed me a successful 
transition to kde4, a single app at a time, by running the kde4 version 
on what began as a kde3 desktop, configuring it to usability, then 
unmerging the kde3 version so the kde4 version ran by default.  (Long 
hairy app-by-app-transition account that was in my first post revision 
elided as unnecessary...)

By switching to and configuring a kde4 app at a time, I was able to work 
around two separate triggers of what turned out later to be a single root 
blocker bug (the qt4-related painter bug fixed around 4.3.2 or 4.3.4), 
the worst in plasma, the bad enough one in kwin, that were previously 
making kde4 performance so horribly glacial that I simply couldn't work 
in it long enough to configure it to my satisfaction and make the 
transition.  Plus some other less major problems that helped me work thru, 
of course...

And if kde3 and kde4 hadn't been usable at the same time, app-at-a-time 
kde4 configuration while still working in a kde3 base desktop wouldn't 
have been possible.  So I'm glad gentoo/kde /had/ put all the work they 
did into letting them run side-by-side. =:^)

> That said, I do agree that semantic-desktop should stay optional in
> KDE4. Back in my KDE days I hated it and always ensured it - and its
> ugly dependencies - stayed off my system. Unfortunately I am not part of
> the KDE team anymore, so I don't know what their reasoning is behind
> this decision. Hopefully they will reconsider :)

Thanks.

With some luck... but I'm not counting on it.  And thankfully, I'm an 
experienced and well versed enough gentooer now that I /can/ handle the 
patching, at least relatively short term.  It's longer term that I'm 
worried about.

But again with some luck, frameworks will get to be usable quickly enough 
that I shouldn't have to deal with the patches for 
/too/ long.  All upstream indications so far is that they don't want a 
repeat of the early kde4 fiasco either, and the transition should be much 
smoother.  That's in addition to the modularity, with the stated goal of 
people being able to mix and match kde4 and kde5/frameworks apps as 
desired, and only upgrade to the kde5/frameworks versions when the 
individual apps are ready for it.

And there's already a very rough early alpha frameworks preview out 
(AFAIK with 4.11-beta1), and a kde/kwin/wayland preview (which altho it's 
a WIP, gentoo/kde /is/ apparently supporting, I see the wayland USE flags 
already but haven't been brave enough to try wayland at all, yet) as well.

-- 
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