Changes/KDE Frameworks 5

KDE Frameworks 5

Summary

KDE Frameworks 5 is a set of libraries and technologies developed in the KDE project over the past 18 years. Most of the frameworks come from the kdelibs module, which has been split, cleaned up, dependencies were strightened and packed into individual libraries. This allows developers and projects outside the KDE ecosystem to make use of these technologies and benefit from work of the KDE Community.

Owner

• Name: Daniel Vrátil
• Email: dvratil@redhat.com
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 21
• Last updated: 2014-03-26
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

KDE Frameworks 5 is the successor to KDE Platform 4, bringing significant technical differences and a change in focus. It will be the first release of KDE libraries based on Qt 5, which brings significant improvements to users. New technologies are being introduced and libraries are being cleaned up, reviewed and brought up to date with new standards. At the same time, the team is making the development platform more modular and making it easier to reuse solutions in a wider range of platforms and devices, including desktop and mobile. Technologies such as QML allow KDE developers to take advantage of a leading graphics rendering engine, and allow for more organic and fluid user interfaces across devices.

An important goal of KDE Frameworks 5 is to bring the benefits of KDE technology to Qt5 users outside the KDE Community. Libraries are split into distinct components, making it possible for Qt developers to take components without dragging in other unnecessary libraries. (from http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/04/kde-release-structure-evolves)

KDE Frameworks 5 don't provide any UI or applications on their own, but are meant as extensions and addons for the Qt toolkit. In future there will be various desktop shells like Plasma 2 and applications built on top of KDE Frameworks 5 providing the full-featured KDE desktop ("KDE 5").

All Frameworks are co-installable with current all KDE 4 packages.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora will ship the latest software provided by the KDE Community and will offer application developers access to various technologies making it easier to develop new applications and allowing to replace custom solutions to common problems in existing applications by well-tested and feature-rich Frameworks.

Scope

• Proposal owners: All frameworks are already packaged and are currently provided in a COPR repository. We only need to have all the packages reviewed and submit them into Fedora. Given the amount of frameworks (currently 60), this will take some time to process. This is a completely isolated change that will not affect any other packages or changes.

• 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

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

How To Test

It should be possible to install all KDE Frameworks and run and develop applications against them.

User Experience

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Dependencies

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks product? possibly Fedora Plasma

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release Notes

Fedora 21 includes KDE Frameworks 5, successor to KDE Platform 4. KDE Frameworks 5 are based on Qt 5 and give developers of C++ and Qt applications access large variety of technologies and tools developed by the KDE Community, without having to depend on the entire KDE platform.

http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/25/frameworks-5