App duplication again (Re: new project in kdemultimedia)

[David Faure]

On Monday 06 May 2002 22:47, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> This already happens with KOffice and I would like to see that extended to 
> other packages.

To mention the drawbacks of that approach, since I've been experiencing them with
the KOffice releases:
* the app must keep compiling with the latest stable kdelibs, which not many
people test since we developers tend to get and update everything from CVS.
It also means some #ifdef code, some stuff that can't be done at all until the
next kdelibs comes out, etc.

* it takes much more effort for the actual releases (packaging, announcement,
changelogs, etc.), so this will require many more "release dudes". For apps
which have active maintainers, no problem, but who's going to release the next
version of, say, kpaint, or kfloppy, or khexedit? Ok, if the app _really_ doesn't
change then there's no point, but if it gets some occasional bugfixes only, those
will never get out to the users.

Back to the "release effort" - sometimes when I spend so much time actually
releasing KOffice, I wish I wouldn't have to do that and I could spend more time
on actually improving it. Of course the point is to let the users have it, and we need
betas for testing, but it takes quite some effort to go from the sources in CVS
to the actual release (tarball, compiling, testing, changelog for the announcement,
moving packages, announcing, updating webpages, synchronizing all this, etc.).
Lots of small things, but much time in all.
IMHO the nicest thing about releasing KDE "all at once" is that all this gets
factorized into a single task. I see the advantage for the translation and documentation
process though... So maybe the solution is an intermediary, like releasing 4
modules at once? Hmm, dunno. But please keep this in mind: if every single app
has to be released separately, developers will lose much time releasing, time which
they would otherwise use to develop/fix their apps.
Well, then we have to automate this process, like I think SourceForge does...
Not as easy as just saying it though, none of the list I cited above is currently
in a state that can easily be automated.

-- 
David FAURE, david at mandrakesoft.com, faure at kde.org
http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~david/
Contributing to: http://www.konqueror.org/, http://www.koffice.org/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today