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

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Thursday 16 January 2014 22:24:09 Marco Martin wrote:
> they are both desiderable, but they seems quite in contrast each other.
> I'm sure I'm hitting a false dichotomy there, but not seeing a clear
> solution.  does anybody does?

There shouldn't be a dichotomy. It's a matter of defining and then pointing out 
sensible groupings of applications (a term which I use broadly here) to 
downstream. Whether any particular downstream picks it up (e.g. as a FreeBSD 
metaport or an OpenSUSE product) is up to them. But just defining these things 
forces *us* to think about how things work together and what kinds of tasks / 
workflows / hobbies we can effectively enable with our applications. It can also 
help downstream think about how *they* group stuff and present it to the user.

This discussion is straying close to "package management without talking about 
packages anymore". That's probably a good thing.

In the FreeBSD world, there's a history of having metapackages that get 
particular tasks done. One is called "kde4" and it installs a whole bunch of 
KDE things; also extragear apps and some third-party stuff as well. But my 
favorite metaport used to be "instant-workstation". You install it, and it 
pulls in the X server, some programming libraries, programming tools, and twm. 
And it's a great match between the task I want to accomplish and the 
(meta)package that implements this. And then I don't need to worry about 
figuring out where to get xterm from, if I can trust the people who define 
instant-workstation to think about the task at hand and what tools are needed.

Note also that we *have* some kinds of metapackages already defined. Thery're 
on our website, at http://www.kde.org/applications/ . You'll note that the 
list of applications in "graphics" doesn't coincide with the repositories, and 
does include digiKam, because that's a useful application for doing (some 
kinds of) graphics work.

Who said tags earlier in this thread? Yeah.

[ade]