KDE4 ports will be removed from FreeBSD ports on December 31st, 2018

The KDE-FreeBSD team met at Akademy this year, and while hacking on some other stuff, we also got around to deciding what to do with the KDE4 ports. We have wanted to get rid of them for some time, and there is an increasing pressure of maintainence on them: code written in 2003 doesn't play well with the C++ of 2018 (in particular clang keeps getting more picky, which is good).

As for KDE4 itself: there haven't been any upstream KDE4 releases since Applications 17.08.3, and Qt4 upon which it depends is EOL since 2015. The latest KDE Plasma desktop has been available in the official ports tree for over four months (and has been in use by users of Area51 for much much longer).

So, given that there is a viable upgrade path (although, truth be told, you'll probably have to re-configure KMail and get used to Falkon), we've decided to put a four month deprecation period on all the KDE4 ports. They will be removed at the end of this year, which will free up some maintainence time for chasing the steady stream of updates from the KDE community.