Package request: Trinity Desktop Environment

[opain-replika]

Project description The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) project is a computer desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems with a primary goal of retaining the function and form of traditional desktop computers. KDE3.5 Fork that still continues to develop. Very light on resources. TDE is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software. Born as a fork of KDE 3.5 back in 2010, TDE is now a fully independent project with its own personality and development team, available for various Linux distros, BSD and DilOS.

Metadata

• homepage URL: https://trinitydesktop.org/
• source URL: http://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/
• license: "GPL and other licenses" (artwork, I think LGPL)
• platforms: linux, freebsd (,other unix-like)

This will be probably pretty tough to package, but I hope you do it. It is very hard to install on any unsupported distribution, especially for newbies. Nixpkg should probably help a lot by installing it using nix on any distro.

[jtojnar]

See also https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/18715

Also, I would not set your hope on being able to use the Nix packages on other distros. Applications might work but desktop environment will require plumbing outside of Nix packages (e.g. in NixOS module or other similar mechanism).

[peterhoeg]

Considering we barely have enough people to keep other DEs going, the chances of anybody doing anything substantial about this are very slim.

[opain-replika]

This DE doesn't update frequently. The situation with it should be similar to that of Xfce. Also it is lighter than the said Xfce which was considered light, but with gtk3 implementation increased it's requirements.

[jtojnar]

It does not matter if it is “lighter”, the main issue are integration costs. GTK-based DEs are easy to integrate because GNOME platforms is, for better or worse, based on C and simple build systems that do not make many assumptions about the system.

Qt, on the other hand, is notably hard to integrate because it relies heavily on dynamically loaded modules that do not have stable ABI. If Trinity is anything like Qt5 based applications and Plasma, it will require heavy patches and I doubt anyone will find time to package it unless they really want to use it or someone pays them to do it.

[peterhoeg]

The intersection of people who are interested themselves in running an obsolete DE and those who have the time/knowledge to get things going/keep running is vanishingly small so it's unlikely to happen.

[micheleCTDE]

TDE is developed mostly in C/C++ and it is based on its own fork of qt3 (namely tqt3). It is actively maintained and developed and releases twoce a year. It can already be built for multiple distros and architectures. Whether you want to package it for NixOS it is up to you (I fully understand the issue of lack of resources), just wanted to add some info.

[ShamrockLee]

How about developing inside a separate repo as a flake? :snowflake:

This would drastically decrease the cost of integration while remains accessible to users. After most of the things are done, it can be included in nix-community and make use of the binary-cache there.

You can also ask for help on NixOS Discourse when encountering problems.

[jtojnar]

By integration, I meant patching the TDE source code to fix incorrect assumptions about file system structure and other such things, which flake could not really affect.

[ShamrockLee]

By integration, I meant patching the TDE source code to fix incorrect assumptions about file system structure and other such things, which flake could not really affect.

I see.

[EchedelleLR]

Any update?

[jtojnar]

If someone started working on this, they would surely post updates here.

[EchedelleLR]

Thank you for the tip. I was also interested if there was any plan or thought to work on it soon.