HOWTO: Use KDE 3 from F8 on F10

[Roberto Ragusa]

Rex Dieter wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 
>> Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> 
>>> I'm not writing all the details here now, but if anyone is
>>> interested, I can do it (and publish the spec files if
>>> someone wants to try).
>> Please don't. We don't want our users to run unsupported software, and we
>> especially don't want you to make it easy for them to do that.
> 
> As long as Roberto makes it clear that making such changes are unsupported, 
> and if anything breaks, you're on your own and get to keep the pieces... 

No doubt on that.
To be considered highly unsupported.

> That said, I would have much preferred that folks (like Roberto) who 
> want/need KDE3 made more effort to work *with* fedora and and the fedora 
> kde-sig to try to make sure everything is kosher.  I've extended quite a few 
> invitations for such in the past... without any takers, so far.  *shrug*.  

Rex, I really have considered the possibility to get involved in Fedora.
I started with RedHat 5.1 (and a manually installed KDE 1), I can code
in C, I am interested in KDE.
But I don't think I can be productive on something as complex as KDE.
I never tried to build it from source.
Not even I've recompiled its src.rpm. Just satisfied dependencies.

My idea was to become a Fedora packager and start with small packages
which I still don't see included in Fedora.
What discouraged me is the fact that I'm not sure how much time I could dedicate.
And, even more, I'm a little scared by the technical and political
bureaucracy of the Fedora project. I didn't investigate deeply, but I
read about accounts, certificates, tickets, sponsorships, reviews... it
looks like it requires quite an effort to become part of the project.

> Not that I was expecting any.  I'll be honest to say that my ulterior motive 
> was that as soon as anyone took a look at this closely and seriously, they'd 
> soon find out how difficult (perhaps impossible) a problem it was...

I'd say it is not too difficult.
Maybe KDE3 KDE4 coexistence is difficult.
But KDE3 support was easy. I have made it with less effort than I thought.
My crazy experiment unexpectedly succeeded with very good results.

I just created compat libs packages, for two reasons:
- have old versions of the libs
- remove stuff conflicting at filename level with the new package (e.g. docs)

An experienced packager would recompile KDE3 to link the new libs and
get something better than what I have.

This is the list of compat rpms to be able to run on F9:

- openssl098b
- openldap2339
- mikmod322
- libopensync022

For F10 you have to add:

- bluez-libs-compat336
- exiv2-compat0162
- libmtp-compat0261

My KDE3 installation is quite complete.
There could be something else to do for packages I do not have,
but I would not describe the thing as "perhaps impossible".

My opinion is that people were wrong in two things about keeping KDE3
around ("people" includes me too):
- underestimated the need
- overestimated the effort
"Not worth spending so much time on something not really needed"
Maybe we were wrong.

Thank you for your time, Rex.
I know how much you contribute to KDE.
-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it