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Re: KDE in Debian, a personal POV



On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:52:09PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:
> Debian ships all sorts of software, including even
> non-free software.  Would it be possible to continue
> rebuilding and shipping KDE 3.5, perhaps in "contrib",
> perhaps with a huge "no security updates" disclaimer?

Hi Mike.  You've implied elsewhere in this thread that you have some
users for whom you provide KDE-based desktop support of some kind.
Would you really be willing to provide these people with a desktop
comprised of software that not only gets no security support from the
distro vendor, but also no security support from an upstream development
community?

KDE 3 is dead.  Nobody is looking after the code base to find and squash
bugs, patch security flaws, maintain compatibility with possible API
changes of library dependencies, etc.  This is not a simple matter of
packaging.  This is an orphaned project.  Maybe someday this trinity
project will amount to something, but it can not be considered anything
short of a fork of the original KDE code base.  It does not have the
same developer community or resources, and can not be considered the
same project.  If it ends up getting packaged for Debian, which is
certainly within the realm of possibilities, then it must be treated as
a new project, and go through the standard NEW queue and all that.  If
the upstream maintainers of that project end up building a community of
developers around their project, and there are people interested in
packaging it for Debian, then you could very well see it included in
squeeze+1.  Given that nobody here has expressed any interest in
actually doing that, I'm not sure how likely it really is.  Howver, no
matter what happens, there is zero chance of it being included in
squeeze.

noah

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