Help make the KDE Platform modular, instead of complicating each single KDE program (was: Re: Filelight into kdereview (again))

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi Nick,

Mardi, le 28 septembre 2010, à 19:10, Nick Shaforostoff a écrit:
> 2010/9/28 Martin Sandsmark <sandsmark at samfundet.no>:
> > I'd rather you spend your time making it easier for people to get kdelibs
> > on Windows if you care about Windows, as this will also benefit other
> > KDE applications (like KTorrent and KMail and whatnot else I imagine
> > Windows people would like).
> 
> I ran kdewin installer. Just selecting a simple app like kate triggers
> installing a lot of packages I don't need, like mysql, soprano,
> phonon.
> 
> If I want to show filelight to a typical windows user, he would reject
> this when he sees the huge (also in terms of disk space) package list
> that is needed for it.

Easy to fix: just comment out the call in the installer code which makes it 
shown to the user ;) And blame the time needed to download on a poor internet 
connection. 

> I believe users need filelight to clean their hard drives, not to fill
> it with megabytes of some software ;)

Hehe :) Still, I agree, the same is true also for those who want to use other 
KDE programs like Kate, or that pretty simple hex editor from kdeutils (kdesdk 
starting with 4.6) </promo>, on those systems already equipped with some 
(native) GUI/environment stack. Hard to explain that one has to install also 
half of the stack of our platform, especially as all other programs on that 
system will not gain anything from that. (Also means less selling point to 
attract people to a Full-KDE-Platform experience.)

But do you really plan to go and patch all those programs to make them plain 
feature-poor Qt programs (besides, almost noone would welcome such patches, me 
included)? Just think about how you can be way more effective if you go to the 
root and help the teams working on support for $other systems, by splitting up 
the KDE Platform into smaller chunks and making some of the platform features 
even optional, so dependencies are as small as sensible.

After all, we are KDE, not Qt groupies. And you are, too, I expect :)

So if you are interested in having more KDE programs, please consider to e.g. 
go to http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows and join the team.

Your (and any other's) hand will be welcome, I guess!

Cheers
Friedrich
-- 
KDE Okteta - a simple hex editor - http://utils.kde.org/projects/okteta