On Wed, 02 May 2012 10:46:56 -0500
"David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@...> wrote:

> 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.
FreeBSD has no desktop environment, not even the X.org server.
They all belong to the ports collection, where upstream KDE is still
there and actively maintained:
http://freebsd.kde.org/
> 
>   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.
>