All,
I found this a very interesting tidbit posted by Felix Miata on the opensuse kde3 list this morning. According to distrowatch, BSD has gone from kde4 back to kde3 for both its release 9 and 10 due out this month. It has also gone back to FF 3.6:
<quote> I was looking over distrowatch, opened the BSD page, and noticed some interesting data points:
Version 8.1 8.2 9.0 9 10 Released 2010/07 2011/02 2012/01 2012/05 2012/05 Firefox 3.6.4 3.6.13 9.0.1 3.6.28 3.6.28 K3B 1.0.5 2.0.2 2.0.2 1.0.5 1.0.5 KDE 4.4.5 4.5.5 4.7.3 3.5.10 3.5.10 QT 4.6.3 4.7.1 4.7.4 4.7.4 4.7.4 Samba 3.4.8 3.5.6 3.6.1 3.6.4 3.6.4 T Bird 3.0.5 3.1.7 9.0 3.1.20 3.1.20 </quote>
This caught my eye for a number of reasons. First, it is a major distro shifting back to kde3. This bodes well for TDE for a number of reasons (a) additional patch collaboration, (b) Qt3 -> Qt4 development experience. I do not know what the details are, but if BSD has ported the kde3 kwin widget set/styles/etc.. that should make it much easier for someone to build a prototype of TDE on the current kwin as Martin discussed.
Next, the Mozilla downgrades were of interest as well. The current releases seem to take quite a bit of CPU and require manual maintenance to vacuum and reindex the sqlite databases to prevent them from growing wildly. (if you haven't checked your firefox and tbird profiles lately, then cd into you .mozilla/firefox/<blah349.default> and .thunderbird/<blah349.default> directories and then 'ls -al *.sqlite'). You will be surprised what you find. You can repair them with:
for i in *.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; sqlite3 $i reindex; done
But I digress. The point being, between BSD, opensuse and others either returning to, or presently maintaining, kde3, the opportunities for advancing TDE become better and better each day. It might be a good idea to open up channels of communication between the developers so that everyone can benefit from the good work done by the kde/tde community as a whole.