Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 19:50 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394)
In reply to: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News) by JoeF
Parent article: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

That's like asking for the KDE3 version of Kopete to run without KDE3's libraries, e.g. make it run with KDE1's libraries. Well, that's an impossibility.

However you can install just the KDE Dev Platform 4 libraries and runtime (something not easily achieved with KDE3, btw; we made this much easier by purposefully reorganizing parts of our source tree for the 4.x releases). This makes it no different in any way to any other application out there that uses shared libraries.

The libraries are, btw, less than 10% of the code of the overall KDE codebase.

"The answer is: because it is tightly coupled to KDE4."

That is factually incorrect. It only uses the 4.x libraries and is not tightly coupled to any other part of KDE's software outside of that. It isn't tightly coupled to other KDE appications and has no coupling at all to any KDE workspace (or non-KDE workspace, for that matter).

"Get your act together and release a stand-alone kopete that runs on KDE3."

The version of Kopete that comes with the 4.x series does run in the KDE3 workspace and aside other KDE3 apps just fine as long as you have the 4.x libs (and that's all!) installed; we also released a KDE3 version of Kopete, though that is no longer developed further. You are free to do so.

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Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 21:56 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]

The version of Kopete that comes with the 4.x series does run in the KDE3 workspace and aside other KDE3 apps just fine as long as you have the 4.x libs (and that's all!) installed

So, you essentially confirm that there is no decoupling at this point.

we also released a KDE3 version of Kopete, though that is no longer developed further. You are free to do so.

I've found the patches to get the Yahoo login working for kopete 0.12.7, and I am using that now, thank you very much.

But again, the whole issue is not about any particular program per se. The issue is that your announcement of decoupling is nothing more than basically meaningless marketing hogwash at this point.
I hope you add some meat, i.e., actually _do_ the decoupling you talk about.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 22:28 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

"So, you essentially confirm that there is no decoupling at this point."

No; you're evidently asking for Kopete not to use any libraries. That's not how software works.

What we're saying is that there is a development platform, workspaces and applications. The applications and workspaces use the dev platform, but applications and workspaces do not rely on each other.

As I explained above (the comment containing the example using Zypper) you can quite easily see this in action.

"I've found the patches to get the Yahoo login working for kopete 0.12.7, and I am using that now, thank you very much."

Great! :)

"The issue is that your announcement of decoupling is nothing more than basically meaningless marketing hogwash at this point."

The announcement is completely accurate. The decoupling talked about in the announcement is not at all what you are looking for (applications 'magically' using libraries they haven't been written for; in such a world the GIMP could use Qt and MS Office would run on Linux natively). From what we can gather from your previous comments you have some deep misconceptions about how things are put together within KDE's software. To be frank, that is something we do take part of the blame for: we have not been very clear in how we communicate "how things actually get put together" and so people end up with all sorts of odd ideas. This rebranding is one piece in the overall solution for that happening to people in the future.

But to reiterate: apps are not tied to the workspace; they are not tied to each other; they do depend on the development platform (which is the entire point of the dev platform, of course), but that is a relatively thin layer of libraries (relative to the bulk of applications above and software infrastructure below). This is exactly what the announcement tries to make clear, and this is exactly how it's been since at least KDE 3.0 if not even earlier. (IOW, this isn't even a "KDE4" thing)

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 30, 2009 6:30 UTC (Mon) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]

No; you're evidently asking for Kopete not to use any libraries. That's not how software works.
I know very well how software works, I develop software myself.
But, I would not have my users jump through the amount of hoops that you apparently think is ok.
And I don't think I have misconceptions about how KDE works. I understand very well that kopete, for example, relies on certain libraries. But I don't think it relies on most of the libraries that need to be compiled in kdelibs. And it certainly doesn't need all the things in kdenetworks.
And I have a certain understanding of the word "decoupling", based on the English dictionary definition. It seems to me that the KDE people use a different definition.