Hello everyone, tl;dr -> 4.11 will be the last feature release of kde-workspace. Plasma Workspaces will be feature frozen and we are committing to 2 years of maintenance releases of 4.11. The next feature release of kde-workspace will be Plasma Workspaces 2, based on Qt5.
This does not impact kdelibs, kde-runtime or any KDE application development.
As you probably know, a number of the Plasma developers got together a couple
of weeks back
for a developer sprint, Tokamak 6, that focused on a Qt5 / Frameworks 5 version
of Plasma
Workspaces.
We have already made significant progress in this effort: we have a functioning
libplasma2,
QML2 versions of Plasma Components and an alpha version of a new shell loader
that will end
up replacing the plasma-desktop, plasma-netbook and plasma-device binaries. At
the
development sprint we made further progress, some of which you can read about
here:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2013/04/tokamak-6-plasma-workspaces-2-milestone.html
In planning a roadmap for Plasma Workspaces 2, we realized that we have arrived
at a point in
development where, in order to move forward, we need to start porting the
contents of kde-
workspace. In fact, some components in kde-workspace already have been!
KWin needs to complete the shift to Qt5, and this will not be possible to do
while maintaining a
compatible Qt4 version. The changes necessary have been made as minimal as
possible thanks
to work done in the last few 4.x dev cycles, but the remaining changes will be
significant.
Due to the adoption of QML2 and the new unified shell binary significant
changes to the desktop
code base will occur that will cause a similar significant divergence.
Other components will be retired outright, such as KDM.
Finally, we don't want to make our users and 3rd party developers wait overly
long for Plasma
Workspaces 2. We want to have as little disruption to the release regularity as
possible while still
delivering a high quality product on first release. This means we need to start
sooner rather than
later.
To achieve our goals, we have decided to put the 4.x version of Plasma
Workspaces into
maintenance mode. After 4.11, all feature development will happen in the
Qt5-based codebase.
We will continue to roll out bug fix, translation and stabilization releases of
4.11 during this time in
sync with the KDE SC process for a minimum of 2 years.
The 4.11.x versions of Plasma Workspaces should be especially appropriate for
use in long term
maintenance/support releases of operating systems that package Plasma.
For Plasma Workspaces 2, our goal is to have a user ready release in Q2 2013.
This release will
not necessarily be tied to the release schedule of Frameworks 5, nor does it
impact in any way
application development which should continue developing again the 4.x kdelibs
until such time
as we have a working release of Frameworks 5.
This has been discussed within the broader Plasma community (inc focus areas
such as Solid) as
well as on the release-team mailing list. Additional feedback is welcome and we
will do our best
to address any questions that you may have.
Cheers, and happy hacking :)
--
Aaron J. Seigo
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
