trinity-devel@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

Message: previous - next
Month: March 2014

Re: [trinity-devel] Howto best Patch kmenu at Packaging Time?

From: "David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@...>
Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2014 01:28:24 -0600
On 02/23/2014 11:21 AM, Darrell wrote:
> In the renaming effort in Trinity, I rather we did not convert k->t or
> k->tde. I rather we just drop the entire prefix silliness. Perhaps then we
> could install TDE in /usr like everybody else. But that is a different
> topic.

Yes, that is a different topic, but one worth noting. To fix that we will just
have to branch 3.5.13-2 to 3.6 and cherrypick tdehwlib, docbook and other fixes
from R14. The renaming should have been limited to Help files, menu entries,
about dialogs (just what the user sees) -- and only those core files that would
collide with kde4 with TDE was installed in /opt and kde4 in user. The XDG/KDE3
environment took care of 99% of that to begin with.

It appears that the renaming effort was somehow attempting remove all conflicts
and rename all files so that TDE and kde4 could be installed and coexist
side-by-side in /usr. Not only did renaming take a majority of development time
for current code, but insured that every kde3 app a user might want to use on
tde must now go though a renaming process of its own.

I suspect R14 has probably had 50-80% of the development manhours dedicated to
renaming, fixing problems related to renaming, or porting applications to work
with the new names instead of functionality development. You alone probably have
2000+ hours on renaming. That in total is probably many thousands more, if not
tens-of-thousands of hours in total that could have gone into functional
improvements.

We are where we are, but it is frustrating to hit Alt+F2 and type a command only
to have the run dialog disappear without effect. A good part of that renaming
could have probably been avoided. The good news is -- it is done.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.