App duplication again (Re: new project in kdemultimedia)

[Thomas Diehl]

----------  Weitergeleitete Nachricht  ----------

Subject: cdburner app duplication
Date: Sat, 4 May 2002 14:29:20 +0200
From: Oliver Bausinger <oliver.bausinger at student.uni-tuebingen.de>
To: thd at kde.org

Dear Thomas,

I wrote up some thoughts about this app duplication thing.
If you find it useful, you may forward it to devel/core-devel

Greetings
Bausi

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KDE cdburner app duplication - a user perspective

(This is called a 'user perspective' because I'm not a KDE developer but a
long-time user with quite some technical insight in KDE technologies and -
apart from that - I'm a big fan of KDE)

Fact: There's cdbakeoven, kreatecd, koncd, k3b in KDE's CVS.

These are all apps that deal with the same kind of thing:
How to burn something on a CD (and this means nowadays data, music)
And some programs may have additional capabilities (k3b aims to be a
 frontend for encoding video, too) etc.

What's the problem:
1) The translators. They have too deal with hundreds of new strings with
 each of these  programs. It's quite annoying for translators to do
 translations FOUR times for the same kind of action.

2) Code duplication. All these programs are the same at a low level: There
 are all frontends to cdrecord, mkisofs, cdrdao, etc. Each of these
 programs includes handling for these command line tools, parses their
 output and tries to handle their error messages.
And none of them does it perfectly. (Me, as a user of an older cdburner
 knows these problems, therefore koncd was unusable for me, k3b had to be
 patched, etc.)

3) Code duplication at a higher level: Much of useful highlevel stuff could
 be reused. Let's assume a DCOP Interface for cdburning would be useful.
 Will you end up with four programs implementing four similar but not quite
 identical DCOP interfaces?

4) The user. After a KDE install the user faces several cd burning apps.
 This is confusing (the user will not know the difference), this is not
 user friendly.

What should be done: (again: I'm not a developer, just a user who is
 arrogant enough to complain :-)

Avoid duplication, restart again with _one_ cdburner app and with a design
that is extensible enough to handle all features (think plugins, think
_konqi_)

That would be useful from a user perspective.

And one last thought:
Finally it all comes down to the question what KDE is. There are people
 saying that KDE means 'kdelibs+kdebase', perhaps +kmail or something
 similar. But I think this isn't true anymore. A Desktop Environment has to
 offer all basic functionality a modern computer user needs.
Therefore it provides _one_ mail agent.
Therefore it provides _one_ media player (and _one_ media architecture)
[Kaboodle and noatun do not really play in the same league]
Therefore it should provide on cd burning app (whatever this may look
 like).

There are always these people saying: we need choice, choice, choice.
And they are right. Perhaps I prefer evolution over kmail, perhaps I prefer
xmms over noatun. But nobody wants three mail clients in KDE. There's one.
And that's the way it should be for a integrated high class desktop
environment like KDE.

Now start bashing me! (or cshing, ashing, zshing, tcshing, ...)

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