Jos Poortvliet <jos <at> mijnkamer.nl> writes:
Dear people,In a few days KDE 4 alpha 1 will be released, and we would like to give as many people as possible the opportunity to have a look at the next generation Linux Desktop. Thus an article is being prepared to explain to people how they can obtain KDE 4 Alpha 1 packages. A suse livecd already exists, and packages will be available for Suse, Ubuntu, Debian and OS X, but we haven't heard from the Fedora community yet. So, as to ensure the article will be reasonable complete, we'd like to inquire if Fedora will have Alpha 1 packages available to it's users.
I have parallel-installable kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4 and kdebase4 packages which are currently at 3.80.3 (with assorted backported bugfixes) and which I'm planning to upgrade to alpha 1 as soon as it's out. However, my packages are primarily targeted at developers, not as a sneak preview for users like the SuSE KDE 4 Live CD. So the focus so far has been safe parallel-installability with KDE 3 (so a developer can work on KDE 3 and target KDE 4), not full module coverage.
I think that for Fedora 8, we will want KDE 4 packaged differently, with KDE 4 as default, all KDE 4 modules packaged and compat-kdelibs3 (and probably compat-kdebase3 with a subset of the current KDE 3 kdebase, e.g. the KControl modules which are needed by some applications) to run programs which haven't been ported yet. (Hopefully we won't need more compat-kde*3 stuff.) But we have all been busy with the TODO list for the Fedora 7 release, so we didn't have time to discuss this, and thus it's just my personal plan. Of course, packaging for Fedora 8 will not start before Fedora 7 is out, which is 3 weeks from now if things go well.
So I don't know of anyone working on KDE 4 packages like this. I'm sorry, but I'm not personally going to work on any KDE-4-as-default packages nor on any KDE 4 modules beyond the basic development platform (kdebase4 + dependencies) before Rawhide opens for Fedora 8 at the earliest. I'm already way too busy. IMHO, alpha 1 is too early for use as a default desktop for end users anyway. If you want to run (or develop) individual KDE 4 apps on a KDE 3 desktop, my packages are enough (I haven't packaged any such app yet though, and I probably won't have the time to package any any time soon); for replacing KDE 3 altogether, it's IMHO too early, Fedora 8 is the target I suggest there (but I may even be overruled and the target set to Fedora 9 instead, we haven't had a chance to discuss this yet; it will also depend on the Fedora 8 schedule which AFAIK is not decided yet).
Kevin Kofler