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

[Alex Alexander]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2013 at 05:32:25PM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> I already asked gentoo/kde to reconsider, given that they've supported
> USE=-semantic-desktop until now and with 4.11 much of kde4's going into
> maintenance mode as the upstream developer focus switches to kde5/kde-
> frameworks, so it makes little sense to drop support for -semantic-
> desktop now, when upstream is continuing to offer that option at least
> thru kde4, and kde5/frameworks is supposed to be far more modular, so with
> luck will allow users to pick and choose whether they want the
> semantic-desktop components pulled in or not.  However, given the gentoo/
> kde project history with dropping kde3 support and forcing kde3 users to
> to the user-supported kde-sunset overlay even while kde4 was still not
> ready for use (and despite upstream kde's broken promise to support kde3
> as long as there continued to be users), I'm not optimistic, but it was
> worth a shot.

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.

--

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 :)

-- 
Alex Alexander | wired@gentoo
+ www.linuxized.com
++ www.leetworks.com