KDE Frameworks 5.0 In Development

An anonymous reader writes "In addition to bringing up the plans for KDE on Wayland, Aaron Seigo just announced at the 2011 Desktop Summit that the KDE 5.0 Frameworks libraries are being planned for development. This central code will be developed in parallel to future KDE SC 4.x releases until it is ready, as to not cause another KDE 4.0 mistake. When the code is ready, key applications will be ported to the new interfaces." (There's another article at IT World.)

Comments

Feels early

[Windwraith]

Feels actually very very early. After 4.6 being almost identical to 4.5 regarding workflow, bugs left unpatched, and all the little issues KDE4 still has, moving to 5?
Is there a new, breaking release of Qt to catch up with like with KDE4?

Re:Feels early

[KTheorem]

That's it exactly. From what I have read Qt 5 will not have the backwards compatibility for Qt 3 that Qt 4 does. Too many KDE applications still use those compatibility features and so they need to rewrite it so that it no longer does to be able to use Qt 5. Since that will break programs that rely on those compatibility features it is deserving of a version change.

Re:Feels early

[Enderandrew]

I think the issue is that Trolltech/Nokia is moving past Qt 4 series into Qt 5.

KDE has maintained that kdelibs can't break binary compatibility between major versions. If there is a significant change with Qt, and thusly major changes for kdelibs, then they have major release number.

That doesn't mean a massive rewrite and change necessarily like we saw with KDE 4.

Re:Feels early

[suy]

Qt 5 will be binary incompatible with Qt 4 because they will reorder libraries and modularize them. KDE will do the same with their Frameworks. However...

Qt 4 will require very few changes in the source code. Yes, they will drop the Qt3 support, but very few KDE apps use the Qt3 classes support (of the apps that I use, only JuK to my knowledge).

KDE 5 and Qt 5 will be mostly a major version bump because of the binary incompatibily that can't happen without a change in the major number. Some applications might not need any source code changes, or very few.

Time for a new API

[Chemisor]

It is clearly time for yet another major API change. People have been writing way too many applications for KDE 4 and this must not be allowed to continue! Having millions of apps is such a waste of effort - we're the Linux Desktop, for heaven's sake, not some lame appstore. Surely everyone can agree that having KDE developers write all the key apps is the way to go. We are the most experienced and the most knowledgeable in using the KDE API, and dammit, WHY WON'T YOU LET US HELP YOU?

I hope they make it like 3.5!

[Lord Lode]

It would be awesome if 5.0 were more like 3.5 again (its behaviour and settings), but with the modern graphics features of 4.0 :)

Re:I hope they make it like 3.5!

[marcosdumay]

Well, at 3.5 the plasma environment didn't segfault one or twice when I start my laptop (sometimes locking the X). Also, its applications did have a more sane reaction to keyboard orders (like, if it opens a window, let it have the focus). Also, I could have more than one KDE session without windows appearing clamming that it couldn't lock a file and closing the application I'm using (and if I don't press the "proceed" button, I can keep using the app, no problem, except for the window that stay above it). The possibility of having more than one session open at the same time was the dealbreaker that let me out of Gnome at KDE3/Gnome2 time (before that I didn't give a dam about what DE I was using).

But ok, that second problem appears on a kind of interaction that simply didn't exist at the 3.5 time.

Re:Yeah.. key applications

[obarthelemy]

2011 will be the year of the desktops on linux !