All,

  I found this a very interesting tidbit posted by Felix Miata on the opensuse
kde3 list this morning. According to distrowatch, BSD has gone from kde4 back to
kde3 for both its release 9 and 10 due out this month. It has also gone back to
FF 3.6:

<quote>
I was looking over distrowatch, opened the BSD page, and noticed some
interesting data points:

Version        8.1       8.2        9.0         9         10
Released    2010/07    2011/02    2012/01    2012/05    2012/05
Firefox       3.6.4     3.6.13      9.0.1     3.6.28     3.6.28
K3B           1.0.5      2.0.2      2.0.2      1.0.5      1.0.5
KDE           4.4.5      4.5.5      4.7.3     3.5.10     3.5.10
QT            4.6.3      4.7.1      4.7.4      4.7.4      4.7.4
Samba         3.4.8      3.5.6      3.6.1      3.6.4      3.6.4
T Bird        3.0.5      3.1.7        9.0     3.1.20     3.1.20
</quote>

  This caught my eye for a number of reasons. First, it is a major distro
shifting back to kde3. This bodes well for TDE for a number of reasons (a)
additional patch collaboration, (b) Qt3 -> Qt4 development experience. I do not
know what the details are, but if BSD has ported the kde3 kwin widget
set/styles/etc.. that should make it much easier for someone to build a
prototype of TDE on the current kwin as Martin discussed.

  Next, the Mozilla downgrades were of interest as well. The current releases
seem to take quite a bit of CPU and require manual maintenance to vacuum and
reindex the sqlite databases to prevent them from growing wildly. (if you
haven't checked your firefox and tbird profiles lately, then cd into you
.mozilla/firefox/<blah349.default> and .thunderbird/<blah349.default>
directories and then 'ls -al *.sqlite'). You will be surprised what you find.
You can repair them with:

for i in *.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i vacuum; sqlite3 $i reindex; done

  But I digress. The point being, between BSD, opensuse and others either
returning to, or presently maintaining, kde3, the opportunities for advancing
TDE become better and better each day. It might be a good idea to open up
channels of communication between the developers so that everyone can benefit
from the good work done by the kde/tde community as a whole.

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