Re: KDE4/Qt4 removal from openSUSE Factory

Am Freitag, 29. März 2019, 10:37:25 schrieb Anton Aylward:
> > But Amarok is a huge project, and too few people are actively working on
> > it
> > (as usual...).
> 
> Maybe that tells us something.
> Why are so few people working on it?
> Is it not just that it is huge but that it is complicated and obscure and
> not easy to comprehend and become familiar enough to work on?  I haven't
> looked at the source of Amarok but I have for a few other projects and it
> made me wonder about the mind of the creator.  I was always taught to
> design and program with maintainability in mind.

I don't know the source code in details either, nor do I have insight into the 
project.
But I don't think this is actually the case here.

Rather that parts of it had to be rewritten basically from scratch.
(you probably could argue now that that's because of bad decisions in the 
past, but that won't change anything about the current state either, and I 
don't think that was actually forseeable)

Also, some (most?) old developers stopped working on it, due to lack of time 
e.g.

Remember, this is about an open source project where people are working on it 
in their spare time, without getting paid.

That of course also means that everybody who wants to can easily join in and 
help/contribute though.

Not really the topic of this mailinglist though, Amarok is not developed by 
openSUSE (nor is any other software that's going to be dropped).

> > The main technical difficulties (AFAIK) were porting the context view
> > (which used Plasma, and got rewritten from scratch using QtQuick/QML
> > directly), and the scripting engine (which used QtScript that is still
> > available but deprecated in Qt5).
> 
> As in "Depreciated" meaning "Its going away in the next revision", perhaps

Indeed.
Though it's uncertain in which version exactly.
They (Qt) might keep it till Qt6, or they might drop it in some 5.x.0 update 
already.

> Or perhaps a completely new *design* created that just happens to have the
> same name ...  I've seen that happen in the more commercial word for a
> variety of products.

That would also require people to spend (a lot of) time on it though.
And I don't see a point for that now, as it largely has been ported already.

It already happened though, when Amarok was ported to KDE4.
2.x was rather a new/different application than a straight port.
That made quite a few people unhappy, and resulted in a fork called Clementine 
(that originally was based on Amarok 1.x but ported to Qt4, they didn't 
release a Qt5 version yet either though, as mentioned in another mail)

Kind Regards,
Wolfgang

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