A couple of weeks ago was the first anniversary of orphaning Qt3 in Debian, see bug 625502.

In this year, Qt3 has got a few QA uploads with the most relevant change being support to multiarch. And, more importantly, nobody seemed to care enough to step into maintaining it.

In the last days, I have taken a look into how much needed to be done to remove Qt3 and there were slightly more than 50 packages depending directly or indirectly from Qt3. A removal from Wheezy seemed doable given that removing packages is never a problem during the Debian freeze ;-)
All the packages affected have a bug opened since more than one year and half ago and I have pinged all the bugs with some maintainers responding quick (thanks!). I also filed some removals for packages that were clearly unmaintained and didn't seem worth keeping, with ftp-masters responding quick too (Thanks!). And finally, a couple of QA upload for orphaned software that were still useful without Qt3.

There is a wiki page tracking the status of the removal if you are curious:
http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval

If in the future, you are reading this and you need Qt3 in Wheezy, you can fetch it from Debian snapshots.

I have been working in the last weeks in the removal of the last pieces of KDE 3 from the Debian archive and I have found there are a lot of packages that is sad having to remove.

If you are looking for a good idea/excuse to learn and improve your KDE 4 / C++ /Qt4 skills, have to do a small application for school or you just feel like some useful coding, here is the list:

• creox - real-time guitar effects
• kbarcode - barcode and label printing application for KDE
• kbiff - KDE mail notification utility
• KKBSwitch - keyboard layout indicator for KDE (see this post also)
• kmyfirewall - iptables based firewall configuration tool for KDE
• kpogre - a graphical administrator tool for PostgreSQL
• kredentials - KDE taskbar applet to update kerberos/AFS credentials
• ksociograma - technical educational software to make sociograms
• ktechlab - circuit simulator for microcontrollers and electronics
• qalculate-kde - Powerful and easy to use desktop calculator - KDE version
• score-reading-trainer - trainer for reading music notes

Note that I do not list here software whose port in KDE 4 is being developed although it is still not finished and therefore it is not packaged in Debian.

By the way, even if all those packages are being removed from Debian testing and unstable, they will remain in Squeeze, so you can keep using them or install it from there.

The last weeks before a Debian release are usually boring with respect to working on new stuff since unstable is pretty much closed to development. Now that the release is finished, this fun is back \o/

I have been in an 'upload frenzy' since yesterday night and I have updated some packages in unstable: KOffice[1] and KOffice-l10n 2.3.1, yakuake, rsibreak and tintin++. Another of my packages, kid3, got magically updated itself in unstable before I had time to look at it, the magic of having active co-maintainers.

[1] Thanks for the gentle push to update this, Pino :)

I also emailed one of my upstream maintainers to ask him about the KDE 4 version of his application and he will likely make a release soon. One of the goals for wheezy is remove completely KDE 3 and Qt 3. If you are maintaining a KDE 3 or Qt 3 based application, we are about to start annoying you about this! See http://wiki.debian.org/kdelibs4c2aRemoval and http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval

The last 2 weeks before the release I had some fun watching how the Squeeze release countdown banner I published at http://news.debian.netspread to a lot of websites, personal blogs, community sites, forums to news portals.
The traffic has been increasing little by little through the 2 weeks the banner has been online and currently is still moderately high, since people keeps retweeting the news item about the Debian release. While writing these lines, the banner has been served 449575 times to a total of 244975 unique IP addresses!