Danimo's blog

Ok, so we just had a meeting where discussed the redesign of kdelibs and kdebase. Although we have great technology in there, with Qt4 we have a good opportunity and reason to clean up the foundation of our very own DE.

Basic outlines:

• In the new structure, things are less tied into each other, leading to an cleaner overall design
• Through the libs-components, KDE might attract more developers and ISVs that just want to use some classes. The hope is that they will eventually use even more of them, they are free to chose. In turn, we benefit from new users of our classes
• The new components will at least be split in core and UI each, so it will be possible to exploit the possiblities that QCoreApplication offers to people seeking out for console-only development with smaller footprint.
• KApplication as it exists in its current form will die. We are currently discussing a couple of alternatives to make sure all KDE stuff is properly initialized without increasing inconvenience for programmers.
• The current classes will be moved to a KDE3Support library to ease porting
• additionally, kdelibs trunk might be tagged/branched so app developers can continue with raw porting to Qt4

The new design graph outlines the new things pretty well.

Legend:

• Green: Qt
• Blue: Platform independent
• Red: Platform dependent

Now go, talk about it and spread the word, KDE4 is gonna have an even more rocking architecture!

The life of the traveling KDE developer is not an easy one. We put our lives on hold while we travel far from home to meet with other ardent souls to bring you Free Software par excellance. It's a hard life indeed, as you can see in the picture below. We are sitting in a square in the old town of Malaga with food, beer and the backdrop of a cathedral. Somehow we manage.

PS: Ivor said that it might be worth to add that we are eight people from eight different
countries, and our waitress is actually polish, owns a Dell Inspirion, and knows about Linux