Changes/KDE411

KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11

Summary

Rebase to version 4.11 of: the KDE Plasma Workspaces including the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform.

Owner

• KDE SIG
• Primary contact: rdieter@fedoraproject.org
• Email: than@redhat.com, ltinkl@redhat.com, dvratil@redhat.com, mbriza@redhat.com, jgrulich@redhat.com, kevin.kofler@chello.at
• IRC: #fedora-kde

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 20
• Last updated: 2013-07-10
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

New features overview

• KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications and KDE Platform 4.11
• Faster Nepomuk indexing
• KScreen integration in Kwin
• Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces
• More porting to QML
• Kontact improvements
• WebP image format plugin
• Ogg Opus audio support in Juk
• Metalink/HTTP Support in Kget
• UI Refactoring in KWallet

Given how the KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 and Fedora 20 schedules align, there should be plenty of buffer time between the KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 and Fedora 20 releases. We are already working on importing and polishing beta version of KDE.

Benefit to Fedora

KDE Plasma Desktop is a popular, feature rich and stable desktop environment used by a lot of Fedora users.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Requires rebasing to the latest upstream version and preparing distribution specific patches. All new required packages are already included in distribution. But as upstream changed release schema and now provides split tarballs for some previously monolithic modules, we are going to follow this decision in Fedora too as we want to stick as close as possible to upstream. This involves changes in packaging, new reviews and small overload for packaging system.
• Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

No impact on system upgrade.

How To Test

1. yum groupinstall kde-desktop
2. set KDE as default environment + KDM
3. login to KDE desktop

or use Fedora KDE Plasma Workspaces spin

What should be checked (KDE):

• distribution integration
• custom branding changes (KDM theme, KSplash theme - the QML one, artwork) - for Preview Release
• working sound in Phonon, esp. with regards to the PA and GStreamer integration
• working kscreen integration in kwin

We are working on test plan for KDE QA.

For more specific Desktop testcase see Desktop Validation testing page.

User Experience

• Modern, feature rich and stable desktop environment.
• split packages (advantage especially for other desktop environments users to select favourite applications without need to install the whole KDE stack)

Dependencies

• upstream KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 release, see [1].
• final release is Wednesday, August 14, 2013
• Fedora branding/theming from Fedora Design team!

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism:
  • In case of problems with upstream release, we can revert to older release or we can omit individual problematic modules of this feature. KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 could later be shipped as an update.
• Contingency deadline: Beta freeze
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Documentation

Upstream documentation sites:

• http://docs.kde.org/
• http://www.kde.org/documentation/

Release Notes

This release features the KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. The 4.11 is the latest release of KDE 4. There are a lot of enhancements and new features.