UDS Considerations for Kubuntu

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, October 13, 2011 11:16:28 AM Markus Slopianka wrote:
> On Donnerstag 13 Oktober 2011 16:31:32 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > Kubuntu has prided itself on being a distro that is close to it's primary
> > upstream, KDE.
> 
> Oh c'mon, while that is repeated over and over again, was never true.
> OpenOffice/LibreOffice is used instead of KOffice (or Calligra in the
> future), Kubuntu releases with KDE3 replaced Konqueror with d3lphin,
> Kubuntu uses Amarok instead of Juk,
> Patches all over the place to be compatible with Ayatana stuff.

There are exceptions.  Some of them good.  Some of them bad.  

For all its limitations, OOo/KO are far more usable than KOffice.  I'm hopeful 
that Calligara will be different.  I don't know anyone involved in Kubuntu 
development who considers shipping OOo/LO as anything other than a workaround 
for deficiencies in KOffice.

Personally I thought the d3lphin decision was a really bad idea (up there with 
releasine with the current kdepim), but that was also in 2008.  

Although not core KDE SC, Amarok is still KDE.  We also use userconfig instead 
of kuser.  We do make some choices among the options in the KDE universe.

What patches?  We make a few configuration changes and add one widget to the 
default panel for Ayatana stuff.  In some cases we shipped things a release 
before upstream did, but the patches are all upstream.

> > Personally, I had sort of assumed that since this is the second major
> > release for Kmail2, it would be generally usable.
> 
> It's not the second major release. It's a rebranded Kontact 4.6 because
> Kontact 4.6 was released late in the SC 4.6 life cycle and the Kontact
> devs wanted to match the main SC version number again.
> Fedora and openSUSE also switched to SQLite as default Akonadi back-end
> because despite not being the back-end suggested by upstream, it
> supposedly works better.
> 
> That said, nobody prevented you or Canonical from committing patches to
> upstream Kontact.

I don't code in C++, so I am rather prevented.

> > As it stands, I don't think we should have included pim 4.7 in the
> > release (my fault) and you ought to consider reverting to a working
> > version for the LTS.
> 
> 4.8 will be the actual second major release and according to Planet KDE
> blog posts 4.8 comes with significant improvements.
> IMO you should consider making Kontact 4.8 available as regular update for
> 11.10.

If it was going to take another year to get right, then it shoulnd't have been 
released.  IMO upstream should release working software.

Scott K