I really think and hope that KDE and Trinity could collaborate. To make it quite clear only Trinity would benefit from a closer collaboration. From a KDE standpoint I could as well relax and wait till the annoyance of the fork has died away.
I don't like the arrogance displayed here.
But to get to a closer collaboration the Trinity developers have to start to improve their relationship with KDE. Don't assume everything KDE does is bad. Just look at your users argument above and how ridiculous it is in the given context. It doesn't need me to realize that this has been a ridiculous argument, you could have done as well while writing it.
It was never supposed to be an argument. I don't have time to sit here on the list arguing why TDE is better than KDE or vice versa; I simply brought up some problems that would prevent me from supporting your proposal.
As an aside, have you noticed that ever since KDE4 came out the Linux desktop has fractured from a KDE- or Gnome- centric experience into many smaller, semi-compatible pieces? Think about that for a bit and ask what might have caused this reaction in the Linux community.
As long as Trinity developers bring up ridiculous justifications for their fork there cannot be a collaboration. As long as Trinity bring in arguments which are clearly wrong and harmful to the KDE community by spreading FUD (nothing else the users argument is) the fork while be perceived as an enemy and that is nothing the Trinity developers can want.
And as long as KDE takes the position of being the upstream project instead of merely a collaborator, a productive relationship between the two projects will be difficult. How would you react if I asked you on a KDE mailing list to develop the TDE version of kbugbuster for us?
I don't think we are responding so much to the technical aspects of your request as we are to your whole attitude. As you probably know, for some time I have been mentioning that we desperately need a new HTML rendering engine, and that we would even consider using WebKit or another Qt4-based rendering engine, as this task would leverage some of the advantages of Qt4 without running into many of its drawbacks. Did you offer to collaborate on integrating KDE's HTML rendering engine into TDE as a plugin? No, you instead come asking us to do your work to enhance software written for a platform we don't use.
Collaboration has its merits, but there has to be mutual respect on both sides for it to work. When will we cease to be the "annoying fork" in your eyes?
Tim