The kdebase purpose (Was: Re: Moving KMail, KNode, Korn and related libraries to kdepim)

[Bo Thorsen]

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 22:23, David Pashley wrote:
> ...
> I was under the (false?) impression that KDE required kdelibs *and*
> kdebase. with that in mind, I don't see a reason to move them.

KDE is kdelibs and kdebase. And then there's a bunch of optional stuff. 
And arts, which I'll leave out of this discussion.

But if you just want to run KDE applications, for example in Blackbox, the 
answer isn't that simple. The assumption I was working with is that 
things should run without kdebase. If this is no longer the case, then 
I'd like to know because then my whole argument for moving the ioslaves 
to libs or network is irrelevant. 

My arguing point is that it should be possible to install and run kmail 
with just kdelibs - basically I want KDE to move in the direction that 
all modules can be installed and run without kdebase. For kmail, this is 
not possible without moving the ioslaves to either kdepim or kdelibs. 
Other apps will have other dependencies. One other package to consider in 
this kind of discussion is koffice. IMHO that really shouldn't need 
kdebase installed to be able to run (I have no idea if it does; if not, 
great!).

So, the question really changes to what is the purpose of kdebase. To me 
kdebase is "the apps that make the desktop be KDE". Apps outside of 
kdebase should generally be able to run without kdebase installed. AFAICS 
only the ioslaves in kdebase prevent this from happening which is why I'm 
so much against them being there. The specific ones I'd like to move are: 
imap4, ldap, nntp, pop3 and smtp. These are all slaves that often used 
apps need to have to be able to function correctly. While they can be 
used by konqueror, I can't see that this is a real argument since almost 
noone will do that for anything but debugging purposes.

Some will say - and have said - that it's not necessary to worry about 
anyone not running KDE. I disagree with this very much. The more we can 
make people want to write applications using kdelibs, the better. And 
just because KDE just releases source tarballs obviously doesn't mean 
that no attention should be given to making other packagers life easier.

Bo.

-- 

     Bo Thorsen                 |   Praestevejen 4
     Senior Software Engineer   |   5290 Marslev
     Klarälvdalens Datakonsult  |   Denmark