Antoine Jacoutot wrote: > On Mon, 15 Mar 2010, Marc Espie wrote: >> You're totally mistaken. >> >> KDE cares about the BSDs, and they're very much no-nonsense people. >> I had absolutely no difficulty getting an account with them, nor with >> folding back portable patches I had to make things work on OpenBSD. >> >> The main reason we're behind for kde4 is that it's mostly impossible >> to compile kde4 with gcc3, so there is some upheaval there. >> >> Also the fact that back when I ported kde 4.0, it was not interesting >> at all, especially compared to 3.5.10. >> >> Other issues have happened since then. It shouldn't be that hard to get >> kde4 to work, once you get past the gcc4 issue (and port cmake, but >> apparently 2.8.0 is nicer). > Of course not having HAL doesn't help.
What about PolicyKit issue? What about PAM? This is the rant from Slackware mailing list <quote> My remark about "politics" was indeed referring to the fact that KDE 4.4 loses functionality if it is compiled while PolicyKit is not present on the system. This is questionable, since KDE4 should be using kauth as an abstraction instead, but as it stands, kauth integration will not be ready until KDE 4.5. In the meantime some of KDE 4.4's components "need" PolicyKit and there is no way around it, thanks to hard-headed developers. The whole issue with PolicyKit, and more generally the whole set of "*Kit" libraries is that not only are they pushed into Linux by the big distros while at the same time dropping support for HAL, but support for the generic UNIX authentication backend "shadow utils" is ignored in favour of PAM. This is understandable if you consider that the other popular Linux distros are all using PAM. However, if we look upon X.Org and KDE as an Operating System's core components, then these should not be intimately tied to Linux. Instead, their developers should strive to keep their code applicable to a wider range of OS'es. Creating a dependency on PolicyKit (which is the work of a single Redhat employee and which is unstable as hell), and DeviceKit which was written by the former HAL developer after he left the HAL code to rot, is a very bad decision in my view. Yes, it is the issue of the big players defining the rules of the playground, and many other developers (have to) follow suit (X.Org will drop support for HAL in their future releases). It's not just the big distros of course. Look at the devastating entanglement of kernel, mesa, X.Org and Intel developers, who managed to keep X.Org in a pretty useless state for more than a year. I do think that Free Software is being hi-jacked for the sake of the Big Bucks. It used to be just the Big Egos and I could live with that. Nowadays, we are being pushed in all directions, and I am speaking of Slackware of course. It is a miracle that Pat manages to maintain a stable and useable distro at all! Even with a team of helpers, Pat is the one who defines Slackware and makes it stand out in the crowd of distros that strive to look alike even if they do not admit it. End rant. I need another Trappist now. Eric Note: I never stated that Slackware will not add KDE 4.4 because of these issues. I merely said that this will not happen in the immediate future. We are working with developers to get our shadow utils supported in polkit which is one way to take away the pain. Another alternative is to take the loss and add KDE 4.4 with reduced fuctionality. Look at my KDE 4.4 prerelease packages# they still offer a great desktop environment! </quote>
