On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 6:28 AM, Timothy Pearson kb9vqf@pearsoncomputing.net wrote:
a.) Have no use whatsoever on modern systems
Most of them do. Perhaps in need of updating to modernize them or add a few missing features, but quite a few do. In fact, there's a KDE 3.4 program called KGreetingKard that would be of use, AFAIK there aren't any other programs out there for Linux, the only other option is to hack wine to run programs like PrintShop, PrintMaster, and PrintArtist, which I'd imagine would be quite a hassle and apparently one of the main things that pushed people away from Linux (having to tweak stuff to make them work when they apparently work perfectly under the rather imperfect and crappy Windows). Perhaps we can add it to the list and update the dependencies at some point or another to use KDE 3.5?
b.) Have been fully replaced by more modern software
KDE3 has been replaced by more modern software. Problem is, KDE4 doesn't work very well, the visual styles aren't all that great, they added in too many fanciful features, and AFAIK have yet to readd some of the old stuff from KDE3 that people still want/need (I last used KDE4.5, haven't checked the site lately, so they probably came out with another release by now). Personally, I'm sticking with KDE3, and I hope that Trinity will be around for quite some time.
c.) Rely on old unmaintained libraries with no modern replacement
To get rid of the unmaintained libraries, you'd need to rewrite KDE3 to use Qt4. The Trinity wiki mentions the last release from Trolltech (which handed Qt over to Nokia -- I wander what the people who use their tech who only support proprietary would think if they found out ;-)) was 3.3.8b, which was quite some time ago, and we are already on Qt4.7, so we'd definitely have a lot of work porting things over, and that's something I don't think that would happen until Trinity makes several more releases and starts pulling in more developers. I certainly couldn't do it though, I can barely do the Hello World example in the Qt4 tutorials, though it will be a consideration once I feel comfortable handling large chunks of code.
Tim