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Re: KDE3 compatibility
by Duncan on Friday 09/Feb/2007, @22:40
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I suspect KDE3 compatibility will depend on the distributions. Gentoo already has KDE slotted into /usr/kde/<slot>, where slot is x.y minor version, so for example 3.4.x and 3.5.x could exist beside each other for a time, and I'm sure that wouldn't be taken away for a change as big as KDE4. KDE 3.5.x and KDE 4.0.x will therefore exist beside each other until the Gentoo sysadmin decides to unmerge 3.5.x. When KDE 4.1 comes out, it'll be yet another slot.
It has been awhile, but I was back on Mandrake for the KDE 2.x -> 3.x upgrade, and while their arrangement was somewhat different (KDE files were distributed into appropriate directories directly under /usr, so in /usr/bin, /usr/share, and /usr/lib, for whatever version of KDE shipped with the distribution release), making it difficult to have but one "main" version installed at any point, early in the 3.x cycle they installed it to (IIRC) /opt (the as-shipped KDE default, AFAIK), so again, 2.x and 3.x could and did exist beside each other, for those admins wishing that it be so. As 3.x matured to the point they could ship it as the "main" KDE version for a Mandrake release, they killed 2.x and moved 3.x into the main /usr dirs along with everything else.
There shouldn't be anything stopping the various KDE versions from running on the same system, the environments one at a time just as one can run KDE or GNOME, one at a time, on the same system, or indeed, various apps from one version running under the environment of the other, just as KDE apps can run on GNOME and GNOME apps on KDE, as long as your distribution arranges it that way. If you grab the sources and direct compile your own, that you are of course creating your own distribution, so it would be up to you to configure them to install to different locations if you didn't want conflicts.
As for depending on aRts specifically, as long as aRts can be set to share the device (that's the problem, as it was designed before that was normally possible and it still doesn't like to share tho it's generally possible and most other apps now share), you should be able to run KDE3/aRts apps on a KDE4 desktop, just as you can now run KDE3/aRts apps on a GNOME desktop, as long as all the necessary dependencies remain installed.
However, while many apps depend on aRts to be installed if compiled with that dependency (and a few require the dependency), fewer apps now depend on it actually /running/, as they (and the KNotify system as well) can be configured to play to ALSA or whatever directly instead of to aRts. I no longer run aRts here, as I got tired of not being able to run anything else because it was hogging the sound devices, and of all the problems keeping aRts working reliably. I still had to keep USE=arts in my USE flags (Gentoo), as disabling that disabled a bunch of other stuff one wouldn't intuitively think was related to aRts (it's likely some of that was Gentoo linking of KDE audio features to USE=arts even when it wasn't related to arts itself, however), even tho I no longer run aRts itself.
Thus, it's likely that with proper KDE3 configuration, you should be able to quit running aRts itself even if you have to keep it installed as part of your KDE3 dependency tree, and can pipe sound directly thru ALSA or whatever, just as I do now, and as KDE's photon will be doing indirectly thru xine/gstreamer/nmm/whatever. Of course, you won't get the benefit of the per-category and individual app volume settings in your KDE3 apps, only in your KDE4 apps, but one wouldn't expect it, either, since they are still KDE3 and not KDE4.
Duncan |
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