KDE3

[Nicolas Pavillon]

Hello, 

This topic has been discussed some time ago on this mailing list without a real conclusion, but I am again considering the status of KDE3 on Macports. Considering that Qt5 is out and KDEF5 is soon to be released, it makes KDE3 more and more obsolete. Furthermore, it seems to not build presently on the later platforms (ticket #41136). I would therefore start considering making the whole KDE3 suite gradually obsolete unless there is some opposition after my mail. 
Considering the existing ports, it seems to me that there are first some dependents ports which could be dealt with (see list below), and then the KDE3 suite itself which could be made obsolete in a second stage. I tried to make below a list of the existing ports depending on kde3 that I hope to be exhaustive, along with my opinion about their status. Of course, any opinion is welcome about them. 
My idea would be that in case all the ports below can be handled, I would seriously consider to then make the whole kde3 suite obsolete too. 

Ports that can be replaced:
- kmymoney: can be replaced with kmymoney4
- filelight: can be replaced with kde4-filelight
- kcachegrind: can be replaced with kcachegrind4
- konversation11: can be replaced with konversation

Ports without replacement:
- kchmviewer: still depends on qt3, possesses a variant for kde which is said to be untested. The variant could be dropped in my opinion.
- klibido: appears to be not developed anymore since 2006. After 8 years, the ports could be made obsolete.
- ndmanager: there was a notice announcing the passage to qt4 in mid-2013, but no new development. Could be made obsolete.
- qalculate-kde: there is a new version for kde4, but I could not get it to build. Even qalculate-gtk does not build presently on my platform. If the build is not fixed, it could be made obsolete anyway.

- koffice: This is a big piece of kde3, along with a whole bunch of language ports. 
  There is a koffice2-devel port, but it has not been maintained at all (nomaintainer). It still depends on the old kde4 1.0 portgroup, and fails at the configure stage. As it is a non-working *-devel port, I would tend to make it obsolete.
  There is also a new submission request for calligra (ticket #37579), which has not been submitted yet. I tested a little bit with the latest versions, and I can get something partly working, so that a port commit could be considered with what I have. For what I understand from a simplistic web search, calligra seems more promising than koffice2 as a stable release software. Koffice may then be set a replaced by calligra.

From the list above, there could be some clean up which could be beneficial, along with some ports which are clearly obsolete. Then, in the case all of the above can be dealt with, it seems to me that kde3 could be set as obsolete and replaced by kde4. However, this simplistic way of expressing it does not consider the mess of ports in both architectures, so that a way of making the transition should be thought of.

Cheers, 

Nicolas