Mailing List Archive

Trinity (Was: phonon)
E. Liddell posted on Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:46:18 -0500 as excerpted:

> On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:39:00 +0100 Dominique Michel
> <dominique.michel@vtxnet.ch> wrote:
>
>> No. kaffeine for kde3 work fine here with my setup. What I want is to
>> find another good solution for watching and recording TV for the time
>> when this version of kaffeine will not work any more.
>
> The KDE 3.5 version of Kaffeine is one of the assorted auxiliary
> programs adopted by the Trinity Project, so there's still an upstream
> trying to maintain it and it will hopefully remain workable for some
> time to come.

Regarding trinity, what are the chances of having it appear in distros,
etc, at least after they finish porting to qt4 (or by then, possibly
qt5)? I don't expect it to ever make the big-2 into the big-3, really,
but having it appear in the second tier along side xfce and lxde, and
whatever they're calling the parallel effort to continue gnome2, could be
quite useful.

Except that I suppose kde3/trinity is still far bigger in terms of number
of apps/packages/size than most of the second tier. But has anyone
actually looked to see by how much? Are we talking 10X, 3X. 1.5X, or
1.1X? If it's 1.1X than I shouldn't think it'd be a huge problem. 1.5X
probably not either. 3X might be, but a stripped down (to say 1.5X)
version might ship, with perhaps an alternate, possibly community
maintained, repo/overlay/ppa/whatever for those who want the full deal.
10X... that's not realistic as a second tier. It'd have to be dedicated
distro, and perhaps get popular enough there to go first tier. But I
really have no idea. Does anyone?

Obviously in current context, "distros" refers to one particular distro,
gentoo, but I don't expect it to try it by itself.

What do the trinity folks base their own work on, distro-wise?

Are there any dedicated trinity distros in the wings?

Because, I really can't see trinity continuing "forever", unless it gets
some community support and eventually some new community blood. And
that's not going to happen, unless it's out there on the distros for
people to be exposed to.

I have a bit of a personal interest, even tho I'm on kde4 for both my
main machine and netbook atm, not only out of nostalgia as a former kde3
user, but because eventually, I can see myself deciding that my netbook
really doesn't run kde5 or whatever well enough to be worth the hassle,
and kde3 could very well be quite a reasonable fit, at that point. Plus,
I could lifestyle change at some point, and given that I've been with kde
since the kde2 era, if I downscale from whatever the current kde desktop
is at the time, I expect I'd be rather more comfortable with something
approaching a modern kde3, than with any of the other second-tier
desktops.

Mainly, I just like to keep my options open, and assuming trinity does
get the qt4/qt5/whatever port done at some point, that really does seem
to me to be potentially the most viable "intermediate weight" option I'll
have, given my own history and preferences. So naturally, I want to see
it continue and mature as a viable option, and the only way I really see
that happening, is if it ultimately finishes the qt4/qt5/whatever port
and gets reintroduced on the major distros as a second tier option, so I
really want /that/ to happen, and the above questions are because I'm
wondering just how close to reality that vision is.

--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
Re: Trinity (Was: phonon) [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:07:02 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:

> E. Liddell posted on Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:46:18 -0500 as excerpted:
>
> > On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:39:00 +0100 Dominique Michel
> > <dominique.michel@vtxnet.ch> wrote:
> >
> >> No. kaffeine for kde3 work fine here with my setup. What I want is to
> >> find another good solution for watching and recording TV for the time
> >> when this version of kaffeine will not work any more.
> >
> > The KDE 3.5 version of Kaffeine is one of the assorted auxiliary
> > programs adopted by the Trinity Project, so there's still an upstream
> > trying to maintain it and it will hopefully remain workable for some
> > time to come.

(Caveat: I have yet to contribute anything to Trinity, and the people
there don't know me from Adam. I'm just a KDE3 user who
watches their mailing lists and sometimes plays with code they make
available.)

> Regarding trinity, what are the chances of having it appear in distros,
> etc, at least after they finish porting to qt4 (or by then, possibly
> qt5)? I don't expect it to ever make the big-2 into the big-3, really,
> but having it appear in the second tier along side xfce and lxde, and
> whatever they're calling the parallel effort to continue gnome2, could be
> quite useful.

Currently, there are packages for Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Slackware, and
(I think) ArchLinux, and there are people working on Gentoo and OpenSUSE.
In other words, it's already out there.

> Except that I suppose kde3/trinity is still far bigger in terms of number
> of apps/packages/size than most of the second tier. But has anyone
> actually looked to see by how much? Are we talking 10X, 3X. 1.5X, or
> 1.1X? If it's 1.1X than I shouldn't think it'd be a huge problem. 1.5X
> probably not either. 3X might be, but a stripped down (to say 1.5X)
> version might ship, with perhaps an alternate, possibly community
> maintained, repo/overlay/ppa/whatever for those who want the full deal.
> 10X... that's not realistic as a second tier. It'd have to be dedicated
> distro, and perhaps get popular enough there to go first tier. But I
> really have no idea. Does anyone?

The total source tree size is currently ~1GB. However, the minimum set
for a working desktop is kde-base and dependencies, which is only about
40MB (nearly half of that is their fork of QT3, which will eventually cease
to be an issue). The "core packages" as defined by the Trinity people are
~200MB. A list of all source packages with sizes can be found at
http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/trinity/releases/3.5.13/downloads.html
This includes all the adopted KDE3 add-on applications like kaffeine, k3b,
amarok, digikam, etc.

That's still larger than, say, XFCE4, but judging from the sources I have
lying around in my distfiles, once QT3 is out of the picture, we'll be
talking maybe double the source size to get a basic working desktop
(kde-base), and Trinity has more features than XFCE4 even at
that level.

> Obviously in current context, "distros" refers to one particular distro,
> gentoo, but I don't expect it to try it by itself.

Ebuilds for kde-base (which should become tde-base as of the next release)
already exist, and I was able to install into a VM running Gentoo using them.
The same source has ebuilds for at least some parts of kde-network and
kde-pim. I intend to experiment over the next couple of weeks to see just
how much of Trinity 3.5.13 I can install in that VM by using those ebuilds
and mangling others from kde-sunset (it's a slow process because I have to
port the -sunset meta-ebuilds and deal with all the borked manifests).

> What do the trinity folks base their own work on, distro-wise?

The project started with a source tree from Ubuntu, but it's now been stripped of
distro-peculiar material. (Well, mostly. Missed bits are cleaned up when they're
found.) The core developers seem to be mostly Ubuntu and Debian people, with
a couple from Gentoo working on the build-system port.

> Are there any dedicated trinity distros in the wings?

There's at least one already out there: Exe GNU/Linux (Debian-based LiveCD).

> Because, I really can't see trinity continuing "forever", unless it gets
> some community support and eventually some new community blood. And
> that's not going to happen, unless it's out there on the distros for
> people to be exposed to.
>
> I have a bit of a personal interest, even tho I'm on kde4 for both my
> main machine and netbook atm, not only out of nostalgia as a former kde3
> user, but because eventually, I can see myself deciding that my netbook
> really doesn't run kde5 or whatever well enough to be worth the hassle,
> and kde3 could very well be quite a reasonable fit, at that point. Plus,
> I could lifestyle change at some point, and given that I've been with kde
> since the kde2 era, if I downscale from whatever the current kde desktop
> is at the time, I expect I'd be rather more comfortable with something
> approaching a modern kde3, than with any of the other second-tier
> desktops.
>
> Mainly, I just like to keep my options open, and assuming trinity does
> get the qt4/qt5/whatever port done at some point, that really does seem
> to me to be potentially the most viable "intermediate weight" option I'll
> have, given my own history and preferences. So naturally, I want to see
> it continue and mature as a viable option, and the only way I really see
> that happening, is if it ultimately finishes the qt4/qt5/whatever port
> and gets reintroduced on the major distros as a second tier option, so I
> really want /that/ to happen, and the above questions are because I'm
> wondering just how close to reality that vision is.

The current short-term development goals are bug-squashing, rebranding,
and getting rid of the remaining HAL dependencies (along with the revamp
of the build system, but that last isn't really user-visible). The QT4
port is a more long-term goal, but there are people working on it.

Also, for non-programmers who want to contribute to the project,
in addition to testers, they're looking for artwork, and will soon want/need
documentation people. Any form of positive publicity is also good.
Re: Trinity (Was: phonon) [ In reply to ]
On Monday 21 November 2011 16:05:11 E. Liddell wrote:
[...]

> The project started with a source tree from Ubuntu, but it's now been
> stripped of distro-peculiar material. (Well, mostly. Missed bits are
> cleaned up when they're found.) The core developers seem to be mostly
> Ubuntu and Debian people, with a couple from Gentoo working on the
> build-system port.

Actually I'm Gentoo fanboy, for this reason cmake port was done with Gentoo in
mind :) (I'm the cmake developer/maintainer for Trinity project).

[...]

--
Serghei