KDE Frameworks 5 Tech Preview Released

[GreatEmerald]

As frameworks and frontends are no longer developed together I don't think that there will be any coordinated release. For the distributors who do images it doesn't really matter. I don't think that there will be images from KDE directly, we are in the business of producing source code not in delivering binary packages ;-) (although all but one distros would be very unhappy with any distro choice we do)

Hmm, I'm a bit confused on this. What types of releases will we have in the future, if any? Only library releases, or will we get KDE SC releases as it was before?

Well yes, distributions can just take a rolling release snapshot and use that. It's just that with such a model, there is little motivation for anyone to make dedicated LiveCDs. since there is a lack of checkpoints. If there is a release, then people get motivated to create something other people can try out. If there isn't, then you only get daily/weekly/monthly etc. builds, which are incremental and thus one doesn't feel much of a difference between them.

And yes, I know KDE itself doesn't make images, and it makes sense. Just that again, without a checkpoint there is less motivation of making one to begin with.

[GreatEmerald]

But I warn you - I could not log back to kde4 before I deinstalled all the stuff again. I believe I have auto-re-login after x-crash activated and as there was no possibility to log out properly...

And that's one of the reasons why it's better to test things on a LiveCD instead of on a live system. The other reason being that it's possible that some old config is conflicting with the new software, creating bugs that would otherwise not be there.

[tomtomme]

oh that sounds very broken. There should be hardly any visual difference (Oxygen is pretty much unchanged) and KWin and Plasma shouldn't crash (I use both on my work system full-time).

yeah I just noticed that the compositing effects under kde4 are the same - I just configured them to run so fast that I hardly recognized them
and the crashes may be caused by mesa 10.1 or kernel 3.13rc6... or all the other betastuff on my machine... so don?t worry

[mgraesslin]

Hmm, I'm a bit confused on this. What types of releases will we have in the future, if any? Only library releases, or will we get KDE SC releases as it was before?

At the moment nothing is decided yet, but I expect that ther won't be the Software Compilation any more. I expect that frameworks, workspaces and applications will have different release schedules (which also makes sense, some apps can release at higher schedule, some might only need one release per year, etc.).

Well yes, distributions can just take a rolling release snapshot and use that. It's just that with such a model, there is little motivation for anyone to make dedicated LiveCDs. since there is a lack of checkpoints. If there is a release, then people get motivated to create something other people can try out. If there isn't, then you only get daily/weekly/monthly etc. builds, which are incremental and thus one doesn't feel much of a difference between them.

And yes, I know KDE itself doesn't make images, and it makes sense. Just that again, without a checkpoint there is less motivation of making one to begin with.

I get your point, but I cannot say much as I don't exactly follow what distros provide and I myself compile everything from source in a weekly/daily fashion. From what I get by following the mailing lists, it's now the first time for the distros to try to package the frameworks and they are still having some difficulties (that's what one expects from a tech preview ;-) )

[mgraesslin]

yeah I just noticed that the compositing effects under kde4 are the same - I just configured them to run so fast that I hardly recognized them
and the crashes may be caused by mesa 10.1 or kernel 3.13rc6... or all the other betastuff on my machine... so don?t worry

then KWin/4 should also crash ;-) I don't worry but if you have a useable backtrace, feel free to create a bug report or put to a paste and send me a link. I'm interested in that :-)

[mgraesslin]

What part of "merged to Qt" was too difficult to understand?

Every part as there was no code "merged to Qt".

[bakgwailo]

As a matter of fact the libraries do not use Wayland at all. Almost all libraries are windowing system independent and don't care about the platform. The only prominent framework which is windowing system specific is KWindowSystem and that is not yet supporting Wayland and won't for quite some time.

KDE Applications should just work with Wayland. E.g. you can run Kate as a Wayland application. The Plasma workspace does not yet support Wayland - the support was completely disabled during porting. Just today I re-enabled that support and it's now on the same level as 4.11, but not more.

Patience :-)

Ahhh, I thought you had merged in Wayland support into KWin already from one of your previous blog postings, and I figured that was the only thing that really cared about X/Wayland/etc. Good to know though - and patience is a virtue I suppose, heh.

[anda_skoa]

At the moment nothing is decided yet, but I expect that ther won't be the Software Compilation any more. I expect that frameworks, workspaces and applications will have different release schedules (which also makes sense, some apps can release at higher schedule, some might only need one release per year, etc.).

One thing that is quite likely though is that apps which from the same "group" will release together. Not necessarily because they are developed at the same pace but because they often share libraries that are not "public API", i.e. have no install headers and do not have any API or ABI stability guarantees.
Examples of such groups would be KDE's games or KDE's PIM applications.

Cheers,
_

[faildozer]

I am extremely thankful that KDE Frameworks 5 is going to be way more modular. I personally love Cinnamon and LXDE as my primary desktop environment, but as an artist I really like Krita, but downloading and installing Krita pulls in all of KDE, which has always been way more bloat than desired. Hopefully this will help things out a whole lot and make it easier to set up my workspace with the least amount of redundancy and dependencies.

[mgraesslin]

One thing that is quite likely though is that apps which from the same "group" will release together. Not necessarily because they are developed at the same pace but because they often share libraries that are not "public API", i.e. have no install headers and do not have any API or ABI stability guarantees.
Examples of such groups would be KDE's games or KDE's PIM applications.

Yes for such set of games it's to expected that they will be released for exactly that reason. For the libraries which have API or ABI stability it is also likely that they will be merged into frameworks. That's what will most likely happen to kdepimlibs.