On 3 August 2010 07:50, David C. Rankin <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
Guys,
This is just a point of interest more than anything else. Many of you know I came to Arch from suse and one of the reasons was suse announced plan to eliminate kde3 in its 11.2 release in early 2009. Arch had chakra and it worked great so Arch was a great logical choice.
It seems that some desktops can't be replaced or removed that easily. Going against a solid year of policy to the contrary, suse's 7/15/10 new release (11.3) included a kde3 repository that will be available and maintained at least until 11.3 EOL. (usually 18 months) The only discussion on the suse list was the fact that the cost of offering kde3 is basically zero and other than a few updated libs (poppler-qt3, libpng, libjpeg), etc.., kde3 is static requiring nothing more than a few hundred meg of storage at this point. More resources are spent building and offering LXDE, openbox, etc. than kde3 required so it made sense to continue the desktop as an offering.
What's that got to do with Arch? If Novell has come to the conclusion that it makes business sense to continue kde3 for the time being, then it may at least be something the Arch devs want to talk about and at least try to figure out the "why?" part of Novell's continuation of kde3 in case there is anything that Arch wants to do to maintain its offerings comparable with distro X, Y or Z. I have no information there.
Currently kdemod3 is still in really good shape for Arch, but with the loss of Jan, I don't know what that means for the continuation of its hosting on the charkra servers. That might at least be worth knowing.
None of this needs any type of reply, but with kde4 still in a massive state of flux (i.e. you can't even get to your kabc categories at present), at least having Arch know what it's thoughts or wishes are in this area before be faced with any changes, may just help the distro be ready for what ever comes along.
Food for thought for the powers that be -- all others, just hit 'del'.
-- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com
You may want to take a look at the Trinity project [1] (unfortunately the website is down now) if you didn't already. It's a maintained fork of KDE 3. [1] http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/