Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: /etc/env.d/46kdepaths belongs to arts.. error?

[Dan Armak]

On Saturday 02 July 2005 18:47, Duncan wrote:
> Dan Armak posted <200507021533.38731.danarmak@g.o>, excerpted
>
> below,  on Sat, 02 Jul 2005 15:33:34 +0300:
> > At least arts is going away with kde 3.x :-)
>
> I read the rumors on that about a year ago, I'd guess, and have been
> trying to keep up with it.  Unfortunately as I've been the de facto point
> man on a couple of newsgroups (one aka the Gentoo amd64 list, tho there
> are Gentoo KDE devs there now), because I just seemed to know more about
> it than anyone else, I've heard essentially /nothing/ on it since then.
I'm hardly a reliable source on this, I can only repeat what I've seen on the 
kde-devel and kde-core-devel mailing lists, and I've probably missed some 
relevant posts there. Other kde@ people should add to what I say here...

>
> Back then, there wasn't even a solid proposal as to what would replace
> ARTS' various functions.  The best solution seemed to be the desktop.org
> common solution, only nobody knew what it would look like or when that
> would be ready for practical deployment (if ever) either.  gstreamer and
> other possible partial solutions came up as well.  Just plain ALSA's nice,
> but Linux-only, so that doesn't work to well.  JACK's nice and certainly
> cures the latency issues so common in ARTS and other sound daemons of the
> era, but it has its own issues -- not /enough/ latency for smooth play on
> some kernels and in some instances.

I say aRts is going away because it's nearly or entirely unmaintained for a 
long time now and has been declared dead many times in many forums. AFAIK 
it's not been decided yet what to replace it with beyond what you already 
wrote here.

> So... what has happened since then, where are we now in the journey, does
> whatever look to be ready for KDE's use, and how many more KDE 3.x
> releases before KDE 4.0 comes out?  (Last year they were talking a quick
> 3.4 and then buckling down for 4.0, but now I read about a 3.5 around the
> corner.  More?)
I know there's a new thingy called kdemm, but it's just a framework IIRC; it 
will still need a sound daemon doing mixing and output behind the scenes. The 
daemon is what hasn't been decided on yet, but maybe kdemm will support a 
choice of several (I've no idea if that'll happen).

> If there are any informative URLs I've missed, either about KDE 4.0 sound,
> or the current KDE roadmap, pointing me to those will be fine.
No idea. There don't tend to be many things on static webpages about kde HEAD 
development and plans.

> The latest
> release plan I see is still for 3.4.0 and dated from late last year!
I guess that page will be updated sometime before the 3.5 release cycle 
actually starts with alpha1...

There's a 3.5 feature plan at 
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.5-features.html, and a 
recent short m/l thread about the release plan starts at 
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=111934060916267&w=2, which isn't 
conclusive but is nearly so.

> It's
> still talking about 3.4 being the last feature release of the 3.x series,
> but as I said, I now see talk of a 3.5 before 4.0.
3.5 is a made decision. It should be released somewhere this autumn. There was 
talk about it being an apps-only release, with kdelibs focusing on QT4 
porting and KDE4 development and having few or no new features, but that's 
been dropped apparently and KDE4 coding will start on a really big scale only 
after 3.5.

> At least Qt-4.0 is out
> now, so KDE-4.0, based on it, shouldn't be /too/ far away.
The thread referenced above gives July 2006 as a tentative target date.

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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