[arch-general] Interesting tidbit from other distros latest releases - kde3 is still there and maintained.

[David C. Rankin]

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
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www.rankinlawfirm.com