A humble packager's request: Retire kdeaddons.

[Michael Nottebrock]

Hello KDE-Core-Developers,

it is not nice to come in ranting and complaining in the very first message
to a mailinglist, but the rant is short and the reasoning valid, at least 
IMHO.

I am involved in porting/packaging KDE for the FreeBSD ports-collection. 
Revisiting kdeaddons for the recent release of KDE 3.2 reminded me of an old 
idea I had for quite some time now: Why not just remove it?

---------- [Warning: Rantish part here. Skip at your discretion.] ----------

I discovered that kdeaddons contains the newsticker plugin for Kontact. It's 
the only Kontact plugin in kdeaddons, out of nine in total. All the other 
plugins are in kdepim right next to kontact, including the weather plugin. I 
am amazed by the absurdity.

----------------------------- [End of Rant] --------------------------------

kdeaddons contains a few thingies and goodies and some plugins for stuff in 
kdebase, kdemultimedia, kdegames & kdepim. It autodetects stuff during 
configure and thus is a packager's and user's nightmare. A packager's 
nightmare because the packager needs to carefully check to not miss a 
dependency and hence some application or plugin, a user's because in the 
worst case he ends up having to install kdemultimedia and kdegames just to 
get the newsticker-plugin for Kontact.

Here are some FreeBSD package sizes, (tar archives with metadata, bzip2 
compressed):

kdebase:	 20 M
kdegames:	  9 M
kdemultimedia:	7.1 M
kdepim:		8.4 M

and:

kdeaddons	1.4 M

Is 0.35 M less for each of the "base" modules (of course kdepim would actually 
grow much less than kdemultimedia in reality, but it's still okay for 
illustration) really worth an addons package?

My humble suggestion: Axe kdeaddons. Preferably in time for KDE 3.3.

Regards,
-- 
   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
 (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: signature
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20040211/142d669d/attachment.sig>