KDE 3.5 or KDE 4.0? Or just Qt 4.0?
Adriaan, Aaron and Cornelis have all tried to reassure application developers that it's not a problem if KDE 4 will get delayed until somewhere in 2007, since KDE 3.5 is so great and stable and gives us everything we need to create great applications. And since my name was dropped, I'll have to chip in, of course.
Bummer. KDE 3.5 doesn't give us all we need. It doesn't give us Qt4, for instance, with all the improvements we've been planning to use. And looking at what the respective development frameworks offer, I'd choose Qt4 over KDE 3.5 any day. Sure, there's lots one can do with kdelibs 3.5, and nice applications can be made. I'll never deny that. But they are not the applications that users want: they want Qt4 applications. After all, it seems like years since Qt 4 was released and we've been hearing about the great stuff Qt4 brings for all that time. No sense in waiting to take advantage of that stuff until it's old hat again.
More specifically, about KOffice: without Qt4, KOffice's text handling will keep sucking. Without Qt4, KOffice won't make it to Windows and OS X. Without Qt4, KOffice document embedding will suck, because we won't have transparency. In many respects, KOffice has taken Qt3 to its limit, and it's no longer interesting to try to improve KOffice on Qt3. To sum up: KDE 3.5 won't roll, koffice-development wise.
So we could release several new 3.5-based versions between 1.5 (mid-march) and the release of KDE 4.0 -- but we probably won't.
We need Qt4 (and actually, we needed it last year already), and our users want Qt4. Of course, if we start porting end of March, then it's a very moot question whether we would be able to release before 2007 ourselves, I have to admit that! I just hope that kdelibs4 will be stable enough to develop against in March.
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