Let's say that there's an Open Source project that after being abandoned for some time and on the brink of Oblivion, it is rescued by a group of developers. This project works only under KDE3 and even though the concept is very good, the code is very buggy and needs an improvement in a design level.

So it is decided to port the application to QT4/KDE4 and the developers reach an agreement to go also for a redesign where it is necessary. And it is at that point that they realize that saying it is easier than actually doing it, from an organizational point of view, so the question arises:

What is the way to come up with a good project/transition plan?

And that is my question for you, given the fact that the process described IMHO, resembles somewhat what happened with KDE (I'm not saying that KDE3 was buggy or anything, but KDE's infraestructure suffered a radical redesign, right?). Even though I've been researching on my own and reviewing blog entries from KDE devs to get a better picture of the process, I'm really curious to know what you have to say about this, since you've already been through the experience.

By the way, I read this entry at Aaron Seigo's blog [1], but I wasn't able to find anything else (maybe I didn't look deep enough). Is there anywhere where I could find a sort of short story of the transition between KDE3 to KDE4? If it is not out there already it would be great for someone to write it .

[1]http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/08/brief-history-of-time-beauty-in-kde-4.html

Since the project in question hadn't been actively developed for some time, it is in a very different position: a new implementation won't have to simulatinously compete with the old implementation.

You could with a design concentrating on the core features but keeping in mind which limitations the old design had.

Probably also keep code porting to things that are really independent of any Qt3 -> Qt4 change, e.g. data format parsing.

Cheers,
_