Hi, I'd like to rise KDE backward compatibility issue once again.
I've read [1] and [2] and as far as I understand, dropping xembed support was more political decision than technical difficulty. Please kindly understand that breaking applications for users is a no-go. I'd like to remind a situation when KDE was broken by a change in kernel API (IIRC it happened several times). But since kernel policy is "we never break userspace", these changes were reverted. As a software developer and a KDE user I'd like to see similar approach in KDE. Nowadays KDE is a software platform, not only a DE, it provides some APIs to other applications. So KDE's situation is somewhat similar to kernel's - you should not break backward compatibility for older applications. There're some proprietary applications using xembed tray and Qt5 < 5.4, for example - dropbox and viber. There's no way to fix them. As for GTK apps - it's required to add libappindicator support to the application, and it's not what app devs are willing to do (correct me if I'm wrong). So proposed workaround requires some work for app devs. And I suspect that they don't understand why THEY need to fix the thing YOU broke. Looking at all changes happened to KDE for several past years I've an impression that some KDE devs suffer from NIH syndrom. Broken system tray (and using instead specification which wasn't adopted by all other DEs), nepomuk -> baloo transition, no KDE PIM (once again... I remember times when I lost all local mail archive during transition from kmail 1 to kmail 2), missing support for autostarting scripts, one more rework of solid (it isn't dropped yet?) - battery indicator always shows that battery is charging... Etc, etc. I understand that some of these issues we'll be addressed within several KDE releases, but it is somewhat like 1 year. Guys, do you undestand that you propose to users non-complete and somewhat broken software for at least one year? We (KDE users) have already seen issues like that back in KDE 4.0-4.1 times. Guys, could anyone tell me what prevents you from making transition to KDE 5 smoother? What's the reason of dropping legacy support? What's the reason of breaking non-KDE applications? [1] http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/system-tray-in-plasma-next/ [2] http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/06/where-are-my-systray-icons/ >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
