Il team di Razor-Qt confluirà in quello di LXDE per lo sviluppo di LXDE-Qt!

Akademy is now over.

It
has been an incredible experience and I cannot express how friendly and
fun the KDE community is. Everyone has been extremely welcoming and a
lot of people absolutely love what the lightweight DEs are doing.

While I was there, we were offered a spot under the KDE umbrella as
a KDE member (which is different from becoming a KDE project, it does
not add any dependencies on any kde library or project). Further details
on that are in a separate email posted recently to the mailing list, I
encourage everyone to have a look at it.

I truly hope more people will join me at Akademy 2014; I’m really
looking forward to it and will be staying for the entire week. Several
photo albums are available on the Akademy wiki, here to convince
everyone to come!

I had the chance to talk a lot about Razor there. It
has been clear the project has been in need of restructuring for a
while now. We’ve had long periods with no commits at all. The 0.6.0
release has fallen behind and development overall has slowed down
greatly. Some people are calling Razor “complete” but, while I agree it
can be sufficient for a lot of use cases, it still is in need of a lot
of polishing and improvements.

One of the root causes is the lack of actual manpower. We lost
several of our core committers due to personal reasons. Everyone here is
a volunteer and that comes with the uncertainty on whether we’ll still
have developers around the next day.

On the other hand, the LXDE team has made tremendous progress in
their Qt port. This is excellent news for LXDE, for the Qt community and
especially for us because the LXDE project has always shared our
philosophy. We both strive for small footprint, limited dependencies and
modularity.

So what happens now?

Our two teams have
met up and discussed the issues and we have decided that the best course
of action for both projects is to focus on a single desktop
environment, instead of two.

There have been talks of “merging” ever since LXDE-Qt was
announced. Having taken the decision to collaborate, we’ve all had the
pleasure of working together already.

Our plan is to
cherry-pick the best parts of Razor and LXDE and include or port those
to LXDE-Qt. Other components will be ported straight from GTK code or
rewritten from scratch. In the end, we want to offer the best possible
experience while reusing as much code as possible. It will not be an
easy process and as always, we welcome anyone who wishes to help, be it
with development, translations, or general feedback.

In the LXDE codebase, PCMan is overseeing the
development of LXDE-Qt which will see a 0.1 release with several razor
components already available. The GTK2 port will still be maintained by
Andrej and will remain available for as long as possible. The plan is to
keep the two branches in sync; as long as GTK2 is still widely in use,
the GTK branch will be fully supported and receive further improvements
and bugfixes.

Whether LXDE itself will become a KDE member is yet
to be determined. Their infrastructure is very attractive and we all
wish to make use of it, but in the middle of all these events we have
decided to keep the decision for later and involve as much of the
community as possible in it.

As for Razor-qt, we will release a final 0.6.0
package for those who are happy with the desktop as it is. We are
starting the release process now and it will include several additional
improvements from the Razor/LXDE fusion. After the release, there are no
further plans to maintain the Razor-qt tree on its own. We will all be
working on the LXDE-Qt repositories and we are looking forward to
everyone joining forces and working on LXDE-Qt.

I am joined by everyone in hoping
this move will bring our two communities closer, as we are
all very excited to work together on a single high quality, lightweight
Qt desktop environment.

J. Leclanche