Hi (especially those who would be in contact with Stephen, see end).
OLD PLANS REVISITED
The old plan was to turn the two libraries part of Grantlee (main one being
for text templating, second one for markup generation, see grantlee.org) into
KF modules in time for KF6.
With KF6 still some decent time away, and Grantlee upstream with stalled
development (even seeing forks already), it might be better to execute the
KFying plans already now. And by that also shift some workload from the Qt5/
Qt6 port time away to now.
WORKING KF5 VARIANT ALREADY PREPARED, INCLUDING CONSUMER PATCHES
While so far we have yet to manage to reach Stephen to see him agree on and
bless the new plan, work has been done to prepare a KF5 variant of Grantlee
meanwhile, tracked in this task:
https://phabricator.kde.org/T14887
The current result is:
* a working KF5 module variant of Grantlee (mainly missing code reformat and
SPDX headers, but already prepared separately)
* working patches for all known users of Grantlee in KDE (as well as Kraft as
another known user in the outer spheres).
See the linked task above for the KFGrantlee repo and the patches to the
consumers.
So basically prepared, just missing out on complete licenses and name
transfer. Modulo further review by KF developers of course :)
KF 5.88 WOULD BE A WELCOME TARGET
In a perfect world we could add the text templating library of Grantlee as a
KF module for KF 5.88 begin of November (the markup generation would be solved
differently, as fork for now in the only left consumer kjots, see task for
details).
This would allow to switch the majority of Grantlee consumers, 10, which are
part of KDE Gear, without #if#else to KF Grantlee for KDE Gear 21.12. While
seeing to have the other 3 either have a patch release before with build
support added or provide distributions with patches for that. So the
distributions can switch all the packages to use KFGrantlee at the same time,
no need to juggle two variants of the same library at the same time.
Now KF 5.88 tagging is just less than 5 weeks away, so this might appear a bit
rushed. But it is also a small window of opportunity, with developers around
with attention to the matter, and where things could be aligned. And after all
the codebase is pretty mature after all the years, and the recent
modernization patches should not have had much of a negative impact. So giving
it a try.
Otherwise I would propose KF 5.89 in December as a target and ask for allowing
KDE Gear 21.12 to dependent on that, even if released just a few days later by
current schedules.
CONTACT TO STEPHEN NEEDED, IDEALLY NOW
As Stephen already pointed out as reason in the original proposal, other
interesting things in life have taken over his resources and focus. Yet we
need his input for two things, so for that we need someone who could interest
him to spend some 10 more minutes on his former, so important to us, work :) :
a) Review and merge this prepared commit in his authorship which adds missing
license headers to some files:
https://github.com/steveire/grantlee/pull/75
b) State by an email to kde-core-devel@kde.org or kde-frameworks-de...@kde.org
he is fine with us taking over the name Grantlee for the new KF variant of the
library, as official successor of his work.
In case please consider to share personal details by PM with me, let's keep
private things private :) Otherwise any help very welcome to resolve these two
blockers.
Cheers
Friedrich
