This situation is very much in flux right now, and I would advise you not to write an article about it. Sorry I can't go into more detail. But anything you could write would amount to speculation (and is likely to cause unrest), and I don't think any of the involved parties currently knows with certainty how things will develop and what APIs will end up being where. Please stay tuned and wait for more info to come out of Nokia in the future. Rest assured that communication between KDE and Nokia is ongoing in the mat- ter.

> I've covered > 1. Live image dependencies: breaking libcanberra-gtk dependency It can bring more eyes on general dependencies hell... > 2. KDE 4.3.1 pushed to Stable This is important one! > 3. Post 4.3.1 fixes > > Anything I have missed? I'll have my eyes open for the rest of the week, > but those are the things that were covered in the KDE-SIG weekly > meeting. (I'd attend in person but school doesn't allow me to do so, so > I am looking at the meeting logs for this info, basically) Could you send us your article to let us review it? Jaroslav

I'm currently trying to start a KDE beat for next week's Fedora Weekly News, and was hoping I could get a little clearing up on the whole state of QtMultimedia in Qt 4.6.

What I know: * Qt pulled Phonon into its API for the 4.4 release.

* QtMobility is creating a second Multimedia API which will be lower level than Phonon which will be in Qt 4.6 under a QtMultimedia namespace.

* Fedora-KDE will be meeting next week with the upstream (kde) developers regarding the future of Phonon in KDE.

* Some Fedora-KDE members (Kevin, Sho_, Rex(?)) believe the API to be inferior

and may end up becoming the main Multimedia API in Qt

as Phonon becomes older and older (via IRC logs)

What I don't know:

* What does this mean for KDE for KDE now, KDE4.4 (which will be on Qt 4.6?) and the future of the project in general?

Phonon->Qt dependency due to QtWebKit using Phonon) and of the Phonon-

* Will KDE apps begin using QtMultimedia (or a KDE derivative) over Phonon?

* How do Fedora-KDE developers feel about this possible change and the new API in general? There is, as always, both sides to the issue and I want to capture both.

Sorry if I sound ignorant on the subject (I am) and thanks for helping me out. This'll be in FWN next week under the (new) KDE beat if I can get a handle on this issue.

Ryan Rix wrote: > I'm currently trying to start a KDE beat for next week's Fedora Weekly > News, and was hoping I could get a little clearing up on the whole state > of QtMultimedia in Qt 4.6. I'd second Eike's recommendation not to mention Phonon yet, we don't have all the information we'd like to have ourselves at this point. In any case, some of the things you wrote are incorrect: > What I know: > * Qt pulled Phonon into its API for the 4.4 release. Right. > * QtMobility is creating a second Multimedia API which will be lower > level than Phonon which will be in Qt 4.6 under a QtMultimedia namespace. Wrong, you're mixing up 2 things: * QtMobility is creating a second Multimedia API which they see as replacing Phonon. It will be on basically the same level as Phonon (though a backend wrapping Phonon is being considered). * There is a low-level (direct PCM access) audio API which will be in Qt 4.6 under a QtMultimedia namespace, complementing Phonon (which still doesn't have a low-level API (one was started on a work branch, but never made it into trunk, and it only has an ALSA backend, more would be needed for portability)). The QtMultimedia stuff appears to have backends for all Qt platforms. Those 2 sets of classes are separate (though they may (or may not) end up merged under the QtMultimedia namespace in a future version of Qt). > * Fedora-KDE will be meeting next week with the upstream (kde) developers > regarding the future of Phonon in KDE. Not exactly true either. We will try to gather feedback from upstream over the next week and discuss the matter again next week in our meeting based on that feedback. (Another reason why this shouldn't be covered this week, the discussion got postponed to next week at the earliest.) > * Some Fedora-KDE members (Kevin, Sho_, Rex(?)) believe the API to be > inferior It's not just inferior, it's also not ready yet and will be incompatible with Phonon, so KDE apps will continue using Phonon for the foreseeable future. > and may end up becoming the main Multimedia API in Qt That indeed seems to be the case. > as Phonon becomes older and older (via IRC logs) Phonon itself is actively developed, what we're worried about is that the copy inside Qt will be bitrotting. > What I don't know: Well, we don't know for sure either. But as far as I know: > * What does this mean for KDE for KDE now, KDE4.4 (which will be on Qt > 4.6?) and the future of the project in general? Not much, KDE will just continue using Phonon. Our worries are about the future of Qt's bundled Phonon (which is the Phonon we're currently shipping in Rawhide, also because of the circular Qt- >Phonon->Qt dependency due to QtWebKit using Phonon) and of the Phonon- GStreamer backend (which is primarily maintained by Qt Software). > * Will KDE apps begin using QtMultimedia (or a KDE derivative) over > Phonon? No. > * How do Fedora-KDE developers feel about this possible change and > the new API in general? There is, as always, both sides to the issue and > I want to capture both. My personal opinion: It just reinvents the wheel for no reason and is yet another incompatible API. This continues the pattern of Qt reinventing inferior versions of kdelibs functionality, ending what was marketed as the first success story of KDE-Qt cooperation. We're back to the times of KDE and Qt containing duplicate functionality because KDE's version was there first and is better in many ways. :-( The QtMobility folks claim Phonon is incomplete because it's missing features X, Y and Z, but when you research things, you find out that X is already implemented in Phonon trunk which Qt doesn't seem to be interested in merging, Y is being implemented and Z is planned, but nobody bothered working on implementing it (so the QtMobility folks could have done it within Phonon instead of reinventing the wheel). For example, extracting single frames from a video (useful e.g. for thumbnailing) is one such "feature X". On the other hand, their stuff isn't even usable yet. > Sorry if I sound ignorant on the subject (I am) and thanks for helping me > out. This'll be in FWN next week under the (new) KDE beat if I can get a > handle on this issue. To be honest, I think that if FWN wants to cover KDE stuff, somebody who follows the discussions on #fedora-kde and knows what they mean will have to do it. (For example, I believe everything I wrote about Phonon in this mail was said on #fedora-kde at some point.) Somebody as confused as you are will just misinform users. :-( Sorry for being blunt…

Kevin Kofler _______________________________________________ fedora-kde mailing list fedora-kde(a)lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org

I think that's the best solution. Ryan is at least trying to follow the discussions on our chan, we can correct him if he misunderstood something. ;-)