[kde-community] KDE Essential Applications - was - Re: Applications in KDE Generation 5

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 23:46:29 Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 January 2014 23:13:11 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > Besides how would you define this "KDE Essential Applications" group? I
> > mean a  tarball? An XML file somewhere? Personally I find distros should
> > be smart enough to decide which apps they want to ship by default and
> > which not.
> 
> It's still nice to have some kind of grouping defined by the KDE release;
> the  reason for that being that it's much easier to say "install kdegames"
> than "install khangman and kgoldrunner and ktiktaktoe and ksnap and ltskat
> and ..." and if "kdegames" -- or "kdeessentials" -- refers to the same name
> across distro's, that's good for migrating users. You really don't want a
> (non-smart) distro saying "Oh, we didn't think kmix was essential" .
> 
> If there's a list of "these 38 repositories / tarballs are the essentials
> this  time around" then that at least is a strong indication that that's
> what upstream (i.e. us as KDE) wants.

I'm not sure the current categorisation works very well here, for example 
installing kdegraphics gives you a whole bunch of graphics-related tools, but 
probably too many (and then some are missing, such as digikam), and workflows 
might still not be complete. (Underlying assumptions, the user wants to 
accomplish a task, not "run an application".)

A brainfart: rather than categorizing applications by their domain, maybe 
providing sets of apps for certain workflows or usecases, a vertical, rather 
than a horizontal integration, if you wish.

For example: a SOHO metapackage would ship Calligra Sheets and Words, Kraft, 
Kontact. A primary educational metapackage would ship edu apps suitable for a 
certain age. A "Tablet" metapackage would include Plasma Active's UI, Krita 
Sketch, and other touch-suitable apps, and so on. These metapackages could 
even cause configuration changes elsewhere, so installing a "hobby 
photographer" metapackage would add an Activity for this task in Plasma 
Desktop.

These metapackages can of course overlap (as it's really just a dependency 
definition), but it would it make it easier to create coherent, yet complete 
systems, and be a way to reflect a clearer vision for apps and sets of apps 
towards the actual use-cases.

Just an idea...
-- 
sebas

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