Hi,
If you’ve been following development in KDE recently, you might have the feeling that either it’s not changing much or we’re doing things that are not having an immediate impact on our daily life.
This is changing soon, the KDE developers have definitely been busy. We’ve been preparing the technical layer where we will base our future technologies. That’s Qt 5 and the KDE Frameworks 5, which has been discussed and documented largely.
Anyway, I didn’t want to discuss about the past today, but instead point you out that everything is in place for you to start porting the project of your liking and start taking advantage of Qt5 and KF5.
So if you’re interested, just take a peek at the projects that are already ported (Kate, KDE Workspace, KAlgebra, KGeography and probably others I’m not aware of, you can check if the repository has a frameworks branch) and give it a try.
If you have questions, remember you can use #kde-devel in irc.freenode.org, kde-frameworks-devel mailing list.
Interesting times coming, do you want to be part of it?
I’m definitely interested in moving my (little) project to Qt5 / KF5, however I’m holding out till beta because I’m not sure the API will or will not change before then (afterwards I know it’ll be frozen).
I honestly think that getting applications to port now is not a great idea. If one succeeds in getting application developers focused on porting now it will likely have the following effects:
* KDE SC releases between now and when KF5 is fully released will be extremely boring for users and it really *will* look like there’s nothing happening that has an immediate impact on their “daily life”
* If KF5 gets delayed in any fashion, then we’ll cause a delay/pause in the application dev cycle
* If applications are ported before KF5 is ready, there will be pressure to release it prematurely
All of this happened with the 4.0 release and the idea was to avoid these things next time around.
Thanks for the post.
I really think it is important to communicate the work “behind the scenes” more. Because currently everywhere (forums, BKO, MLs) you ask about enhancements in 4.x, its either this is already frozen and won’t be fixed/enhanced or devs are busy with kf5.
This feels really bad from a user perspective and this situation isn’t about to change for the next 6-7 months (or even more?).