On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Martin Gräßlin mgraesslin@kde.org wrote:
Hi Trinity developers,
Therefore I suggest to you to discontinue the work on twin and instead switch to KWin 4 as provided, developed and maintained by the KDE community. We are
martin,
i was happy to accept - with reservations - what you were saying right up until the point where you effectively ordered everyone to quit.
the gist of your message is as follows:
a) you (twin developers) are making mistakes b) you cannot be trusted not to make mistakes c) it's a big responsibility and i believe that you're not up to the job d) therefore you should quit.
i was prepared to accept that you are perfectly within your rights to say that mistakes are being made, and it is very useful for you to do so. however you have absolutely NO right to suggest, recommend, tell or otherwise imply that the twin developers should do something other than what they are doing.
now it's my turn to give you a reality-check.
i've been following KDE for a long time, and loved it - it was my default desktop that i put in front of average users, and i even wrote an automated debian installer system http://lkcl.net/d-i which did extensive customisation and package installation. i've done quite a few bugfixes, including in kdm for use with SE/Linux, and i've done superkaramba development.
then i heard about plasma, and was initially very enthusiastic (i'm also a python developer) but the more i learned about it, the more alarmed i became.
then i heard about the EU Framework funding, and was initially very enthusiastic, but the more i learned about the direction being taken, the more alarmed and concerned i became.
then i heard that the KDE team wanted to adopt the entirety of QT4 into libkde and maintain it as part of libkde and i began to realise that there was something deeply, deeply wrong with KDE's development direction.
KDE 4 came about at a time when windows vista had just been released. somewhere, someone decided that it would be a good idea to copy the UI of windows vista. if i had been consulted, i would have told whoever who was prepared to listen that this would be a seriously bad move.
unfortunately, you didn't ask, and so didn't hear, and the train-wreck just had to proceed. basically, windows vista quickly became the most hated version of the windows UI ever to hit the planet... and KDE 4 copied it.
the problem is compounded by the fact that i'm hearing reports that the key developer behind plasma is basically behaving like a fucking idiot. just looking at the plasma API and its verbosity makes me throw up my arms and walk away, so i'm not even going to _remotely_ get involved with plasma or any plasma application development, even though it would represent an opportunity to write a from-scratch complete replacement for the existing KDE4 dog's dinner desktop paradigm with something that i would find palatable.
btw it's also worthwhile reiterating that i did an install of debian-squeeze recently for a friend. it installed KDE 4 without my knowledge, and, because their network connection was so slow (15k/sec - they live in a very remote area) i couldn't get them a replacement desktop in time. KDE4 was so bad that, *without* telling me they took the machine to an incompetent who DESTROYED all the work that i'd done and replaced it with vista.
my friend is now no longer speaking to me because they believe that it was "my fault" that the virus destroyed their windows partition in the first place, and that i must have taken advantage of them somehow, to try to peddle such a deeply-shit replacement desktop at them.
example: we tried for 15 minutes to set the wallpaper. there wasn't even a menu option anywhere to do it. everything that should have been intuitive and obvious wasn't. there wasn't a control panel option to manage the desktop. there wasn't a right-mouse context option on the desktop itself to set the wallpaper.
example: we tried to mount an NTFS partition (their old windows data drive). was there any obvious way to do it? was there fuck. did the drives appear automatically on the desktop? did they fuck.
the whole exercise was a complete utter failure. i couldn't even tell them how to run applications. i had to press ctrl-alt-f1 and go and manually locate firefox.desktop in /usr/share/applications, and copy it into their home directory.
_everything_ about KDE4 was a complete utter failure - it was the worst desktop "manager" i've ever encountered in my life, and i had to find this out right in front of a friend who was trusting _me_ with their precious documents that had not been backed up.
i trusted _you_ - the KDE developers who had been funded to the tune of $EUR 10 million - to do a decent job, and you completely and utterly failed to do that.
now in that context, you might now appreciate why i may be taking a dim view of KDE developers telling the Trinity Desktop developers that they should "quit".
here's what i believe that _you_ should be doing, in a series of alternatives:
* you should consider dropping - entirely - the KDE4 codebase and return to KDE 3.5. i am deadly serious. * you should make room for the Trinity Desktop developers to accommodate the KDE 3.5 applications within the KDE4 infrastructure. * you should make room for the KDE codebase to be compiled successfully with QT3 (so that the Trinity Developers don't have to do it). * you should abandon the KDE codebase entirely and join the Trinity Desktop team. * you should help the Trinity Desktop team by keeping an eye on them and doing specific code-reviews and making useful bugreport comments so that they don't make mistakes (that took you 2 years to learn about). * you should add comprehensive (automated) unit tests to KDE so that the Trinity Desktop team can pick those up and ensure that the code that they develop has self-checking.
just one last thing: you have to bear in mind that i am an embedded systems developer, as well as many other things. i've compiled pywebkitqt4 for a (very good) 400mhz ARM9 that had access to 800mhz DDR2 RAM. pywebkitqt4 ran so slowly that it put the entire project into jeapordy. qt4 itself consumed vast amounts of resources (over 128mb of RAM), and took over 90 seconds to start up.
an analysis of the various options (pywebkitgtk and webkit for enlightenment) wasn't much better, but it wasn't 256mb of RAM. i then had to help the directfb developers port webkit to directfb, and the startup time was reduced to under 6 seconds, and the RAM used reduced to about 128mb (GTK was about 130mb).
the bottom line is that if you believe that qt4 or qt5 is going to be suitable for low-memory usage you are due for yet another train wreck. qt3 - precisely because it has *not* had massive amounts of development or interference - is still suitable for use on systems even with as little as 64mb of RAM... with *no* swap space. perhaps running such large systems as KDE3 in only 64mb of RAM is too much to hope for, but because qt3 was designed for such tiny resource usage and does *not* have massive feature-bloat, it won't be far off.
i'm sorry i had to break the request of the trinity developers not to appear to be "adversarial", but, martin, the KDE team _really_ need a serious, serious reality check. you should, instead of asking the trinity developers to quit, be encouraging them to explore their chosen path (which you have absolutely no control over) with enthusiasm, and offering to help guide them to success.
l.