On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 5:28 AM, Matthew Woehlke
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ok, here's my ultimatum: I'll jump in and help porting *if* in the long
> run it's OK to keep KDE as a dependency :-).

I would say, cautiously, that in the long run it may be fine to pull
in code from KDE libraries in situations where it does actually add
something.

But obviously nobody is going to say "yeah, great, let's add a
dependency on library X" for any X, unless there's a good reason in
front of them.

> > Oh, screw QMake.  We're not using QMake.
>
> You aren't? I read somewhere that qmake worked and cmake was spotty.

We've never used qmake for Rosegarden.

We do have a file called qt4-makefile which does a "raw" (no configure
step) build of the RG Qt4 port branch, and which some of us have been
using while others worked on "4"-ization of the existing CMake
scripts.  That may have been the source of the confusion.

> complaining about the support when no one /asked for help/

I'm not sure that Michael intended to actively complain about
anything, but it's true that nobody asked for help.

I think the reasons are somewhat psychological.

Depending on KDE4 is not a proposition that just "sells itself".  None
of the regulars here as far as I know actually uses KDE4.  OK, that's
not true -- Vlada does at least, and he's kind of almost regular here
-- but certainly none of the regulars here has yet demanded that we go
all out to improve integration with it.  Given that nobody was very
invested in KDE4, it wasn't too hard to decide "provisionally" that it
might be simpler to go pure Qt4, and once we'd taken that step, it
became something of a relief to lose the extra baggage.

Things may have been quite different if either of our most
enthusiastic KDE3 users (namely Guillaume and Michael) had taken
enthusiastically to KDE4.  But Michael was disappointed in its
direction, and Guillaume was so disgusted with it that he stopped
using Linux altogether -- I never quite followed the logic there, but
there you go.  (And so did he.)

Guillaume leaving had a practical effect as well, since he was also
the person most familiar with our KDE-related code (while I am quite
familiar with Qt4 to code for).  But the effect of that episode on our
general outlook was probably more significant.  Guillaume was the
developer who really thought of Rosegarden as a "KDE application",
rather than a music program that used the KDE libraries.

For my part, I think pure Qt4 applications (done competently) look and
feel nicer than KDE4 ones, which is the reverse of the situation for
Qt3 and KDE3.  That's probably just because the default KDE4 theme (at
least, the only one I've seen) is not one that I like the look of.
But that sort of detail counts for a lot when it comes to building up
the motivation to do the porting work -- the thought that Rosegarden
might pop up as one of those leaden KDE4 applications, in the middle
of my nice desktop... I know the theme must be configurable just as it
always was, but imagine a random Ubuntu user installing and running
Rosegarden and having it come up looking like that, in the middle of
their GNOME session.

Intangibles and questions of taste aside, it would certainly be nice
to see as good as possible integration into any desktop that
Rosegarden is run under.  If we can improve KDE integration without
damaging its prospects in any other environment it may be run in, then
I'd be happy to do that, and I don't too much mind a dependency on KDE
libraries in itself.  Best of all would be an optional one, of course.
 But I know that Michael makes a lot more use of the "desktop bits" of
his desktop than I do, and anything that improves his user experience
is something worth looking into.

Similarly, any cases where a KDE widget would add something
spectacular would be interesting to hear about.  But specifics are
definitely good here.


Chris

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