Trinity 3.5.12 is not yet officially released, but I suspect we now are

close to a serious freeze. I would like to address future plans. This is just my rambling.

Correct; the 3.5.12 release is in a little under 4 days so everything should be finalized at this point.

I have seen conversations about moving to cmake. Then there is the

tqtinterface support moving toward the goal of being compatible with qt4.

I presume moving to cmake means all build scripts have to be revised,

not

to mention all the testing and debugging that follows such a change. I'm

exhausted with getting build scripts to function in Slackware, let alone having to consider starting all over again.

No. My intention is to provide the older Automake system in parallel with CMake for at least a couple of releases. This will allow time for the CMake system to stabilize fully, while also permitting Trinity to build on newer systems. The latter is what makes the CMake conversion so critical; Automake (and therefore the Trinity build process) has already started to fail on the latest distributions.

In the short term I hope serious attention is provided after 3.5.12 to

dramatically reducing the number of existing bug reports and enhancement requests.

I agree with this and will address it on-list after release.

I'd like to see 3.5.13 focus solely on the bugzilla. Possibly too,

resolve

significant bugs and enhancement requests from the original KDE 3

bugzilla. Apparent to me of late is that the KDE developers abandoned 3.5.x long before the final 3.5.10 release. The patches committed from the

Chakra project, Suse, and even Slackware is evidence of that. Many of

those patches are fairly old and never got merged into the KDE SVN tree. I'd like to see cmake and qt4 support scheduled for a subsequent release.

Can the transition to cmake be scheduled for 3.5.14 or 3.6? New bugs

will

be introduced once the transition to cmake begins, thereby fattening the

bugzilla. This is what happened with the original KDE developers. They always focused on bling and seldom spent serious time adding polish to what already existed.

CMake support is critical to the continued viability of the project, and therefore I don't think it can wait. Breakage concerns are minimal, as it will be provided fully in parallel with the existing build system.

Qt4 support is another matter. Without significant help I honestly don't see that becoming viable for at least several releases. However, work can slowly continue on it without the risk of breaking existing software, as the Qt4 portion of the compatibility layer is completely isolated from the Qt3 portion.

The release schedule for Trinity does not have to coincide with Ubuntu

releases. If 3.5.13 focused on bugs and minor enhancments, 3.5.13 could get released in only two or three months. I think the Trinity schedule should be independent of Ubuntu.

Not sure here. Ubuntu is a primary consumer of the Trinity project, in addition to having one of the fastest release cycles (6 months) of the various distributions Trinity supports. As a result, having the releases synchronized has worked out fairly well in the past.

Dramatically reducing the bugs and enhancement requests in 3.5.13 would

provide a nice long-term stable desktop. That then would provide breathing

room to migrate to cmake and qt4. My own hope is 3.5.13 focuses on bugs and minor enhancements, not whole

new features. That is, add the polish the original KDE devs never added. Create the stable desktop that KDE 4 isn't.

Working on it! ;-) Remember that unfinished features can be disabled for release...

Just my $0.02.

Tim