App duplication again (Re: new project in kdemultimedia)

[Piotr Szymanski]

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Hi,
Once on a beatiful day 5.05.2002 23:36, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Sunday 05 May 2002 12:48 am, Thomas Diehl wrote:
> > There would be no "real KDE" at all, as far as apps are concerned. It 
> > would be just SuSE, RH, Mandrake and so on who decide _solely_ what KDE 
> > really is and what it looks like.
> They would decide how much of KDE you get. They also tend to modify the
> look of KDE but I think that's a different discussion.
And they can add & remove apps from packages it is their right. The idea is 
that, the apps that are included into kde release are expected to be 
translated, yes we can use rough translation in kbabel, but be aware that we 
have package maintainers as well one person is responsible for checking 3-5 
pkg and making them consistent with i18n-pl rules. It is a big waste of their 
time to make them check the same things two or more times. And they must 
check them, because there could be a different sense in one string and 
getting rid of it is what the maintainer is there for. On the other hand: How 
would you feel if your boss made you do your work for the second, third.. 
time.

> > There would be no problem to have eg 5 cdrw programs, a hundred vocabulary
> > trainers, or 10 vector drawing apps in it -- right?
> Yes. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that everyone should start
> making his own vector drawing app, I rather see people working together on
> one truely great app. However, if that, for whatever reason, doesn't
> happen, then I see no problem in having multiple apps with overlapping
> functionality in CVS.
Yes, but nothing is done to make one greater app, what I mean is: We at 
kde-i18n-doc get a messages saying that we have another app to translate: 
k3b. It is the 3rd cdburningapp added to kdemultimedia, I wonder why was this 
app accepted (I have nothing against this app nor its author, it is just 
hypothetically), because I believe that the autor should be told: "We already 
have a cd-burning app in kde, please contact with its authors and  try to 
work with them, merge code etc... Excuse me, but even windows does not have 
three notepads..

> > I want to be able to go to
> > KDE CVS and get "the real thing". And if somebody around me gets fed up
> > with what distros are giving to him or her, too, I would still like to
> > show him or her this "real thing" we created here: well picked apps,
> > sensible defaults, and a good overall design while saying: Forget RH,
> > SuSE, whatever. _This_ is KDE, and if you want to you can help to make it
> > even better.
> I am with you apart from the "well picked apps" aspect. The apps that we
> have today in KDE aren't "well picked" they are here because we happened to
> have developers who wanted to work on them.
Well maybe the time has come to start picking apps and getting rid of 
'doubles', it is like the discussion about including psi to KDE. Do we really 
want KDE to be an app base containing 5 programs taking care of similar 
things. Is it really so hard to do? Look, we do not have different mail 
clients for pop3,apop3, imap, etc, but we have kmail. We still have several 
IM clients, but kopete is to replace them in the future. The trend is to 
unite apps, as Arcturus Mengsk said: "in unity lies strentgh". Making one 
cd-burning app would have several advantages:
- - the developer would not have to double each  others work
- - it would save translators much time
- - it would be a good way to help kde's marketing: another "killer app"

- -- 
!: Piotr Szymanski | LinuxPL Dev. Team Member | KDE i18n-pl coordinator
@: djurban at linuxpl.org | The website is coming 
#: GG: 2300264 | ICQ: 12622400 
%: "bo jesli ktos sie modli Pan Bog w nim oddycha" - ks. Jan Twardowski.
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