Jerome Leclanche from the Razor-qt project posted to the LXDE and Razor-qt mailing lists yesterday about the future of the Razor project and the LXDE Qt subproject.

“…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.”

In the coming weeks, our two teams will coordinate LXDE-Qt’s first release and Razor-qt’s official final release. The GTK version of LXDE will still be worked on and kept up to date with any improvement to the Qt version for the forseeable future.

In the longer term, most Razor-qt components will fully be integrated into the LXDE-Qt and both teams will focus on the same project. Looking further ahead, the GTK version of LXDE will be dropped and all efforts will be focused on the Qt port. We, the main developers and administrators of the projects, will try to figure out where we align and where we have differences to grind out.

See the complete posting at the mail archive for either Razor Qt or LXDE-list.

Bringing these two fine projects together will require help and we invite developers, translators and early adopters to join the effort at lxde-list@lists.sourceforge.net.