LinuxPlanet: .comment: A Dead End and a Milestone, or "What's Up, .doc?"

If one of the unhappier realities of the Linux publishing industry is that the vast majority of Linux books are likely being written in Microsoft Word to satisfy the need editors and publishers have for rainbow-colored revision copies, one of the more pleasant facts of the Linux world is that just when you're cursing the lack of a feature in your almost-favorite app, it pops up. Or not. As he battles the forces of .doc, Dennis Powell considers KDE's pending jump to Qt-3.0 and all the happy confusion (and progress) that might entail.

"But just as we cannot in good manners complain over the lack of a particular feature when we are using the fine programs of developers who work in large part for the sheer love of the art, we also cannot be certain that our heart's desire won't appear in the CVS tree tomorrow. The aspect of Linux that is at once both maddening and delightful is that it is constantly being developed, with the results instantly available. I build the KDE CVS tree every week or two, and as a result do not know if I ever actually had KDE-2.2. I know I had versions very close to the release version, and may have had the actual release for a week or so, but I'm not sure. I'm currently running a version that identifies itself as KDE-2.2.1pre.

And if the schedule holds, on Friday the KDE CVS tree's "head" branch will take a step unlike any it has taken in more than two years. On that day, the main branch of KDE development will officially switch to QT-3.0 (well, the current pre-release version of QT-3.0).

This is a Big Deal. It is the first externally obvious step toward KDE3."

Complete Story

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