Hi folks,
In December of 2007, members of the Qt/KDE team gathered in
Cáceres, Spain for
a meeting sponsored by the Government of Extremadura.
In the following weeks, we have been working towards the
goals set at that
meeting, some of which have since been slightly altered.
Plans for KDE 3
==================
We will release Lenny with KDE 3.
The current KDE version in unstable is 3.5.8, which will
shortly migrate to
testing. 3.5.9 does not yet have a release date, but it
will be decided soon.
Therefore, Lenny will most likely be released with a version
of 3.5.9 that
includes patches for the most important fixes from the
upstream KDE 4 branch.
Additionally, the kdepim-enterprise branch is being merged
with the current
kdepim, which will bring some features and bugfixes, most
importantly to KMail.
Otherwise, the only major changes to our current KDE 3
packaging are some
re-working of the meta-packages and the removal of
meta-kde-extras.
More info about this can be found on our webpage. [0][1]
Furthermore, I would like highlight that in the last year,
we have attempted
to reduce the number of bugs filed against KDE packages (see
graph [2]), but
it is difficult to keep the bug count low. Since some bugs
fixed in KDE 4
remain in KDE 3, we will be closing them as fixed in the KDE
4.0.0 using BTS's
version tracking, and hopefully we will manage to backport
some of these fixes
(the most important ones) to KDE 3.5.X.
However, we will close bugs filed against applications
declared dead by
upstream, such as aRts.
Plans for KDE 4
=================
We will be shipping KDE 4.0 development platform with
Lenny.
As you may know, KDE 4.0.0 is being released on the 11th of
January
(tomorrow!).
We have been working very hard to get some nice KDE
packages into Debian, and
you can presently find KDE 4.0.0 packages in experimental.
Instructions of how to install KDE 4 from experimental are
at our website. [0]
The primary reason against shipping KDE 4.0 with Lenny is
that this release
lacks many applications that would make KDE 4 a complete
desktop, such as
KMail, and still requires a lot of overall polishing, making
it unsuitable for
most users. KDE 4.1 is expected to fix most of these
shortcomings, but the
release date has not yet been finalised.
The KDE developers are currently discussing the release
schedules for KDE 4.0.x
and KDE 4.1. It appears that they are planning to do
monthly updates for
KDE 4.0, and that KDE 4.1 will not be released before late
July, making it
impossible to include within the current Debian release
schedule.
For Lenny, we will instead be shipping the "KDE 4
development platform",
consisting of kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime, and
possibly kdebindings.
We are planning to upload the 4.0.0 release to experimental,
and probably next
week, barring any problems, push these 3 packages into
unstable.
These packages are co-installable with the current KDE 3
version, allowing
users to run KDE 4 apps, such as the new Okular document
viewer, in a KDE 3
desktop.
There are still some issues that need to be resolved, such
as migration of
configuration files, since we have patched KDE 4 to store
its settings in
~/.kde4 instead of ~/.kde .
KDE 4 will be easily installable using the upcoming
meta-packages.
See our website for more information. [0][3]
Finally, we are publishing all the relevant information on
our website [0]
with the dual goals of keeping our users informed, and
providing an easy path
for new contributors to join the team. But some information
is still work in
progress 
Ana,
on behalf of the Qt/KDE team.
P.S.: Anyway, you never know what the future will bring, we
will review our
decisitions with respect shipping KDE 4 in Lenny in a few
months.
[0] http://pkg-kde.alio
th.debian.org/
[1] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/metapackages-kde3.html
[2] http://users.alioth.debian.org/~pu
sling-guest/pkg-kde-buggraphs/_ALL_-year.png
[3] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/metapackages-kde4.html
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