A humble packager's request: Retire kdeaddons.

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 18 February 2004 16:35, Dominique Devriese wrote:
> By the way, do you and other people also have an opinion on the
> proposed splitting of the kde modules into app-sized chunks ?

Yes, and the opinion is: no.

Think of the mess:
OK I need to recompile kmail. Ah but it has a dependency on libkdenetwork, I'll
cvs update and recompile that first. Oh but it also depends on libkdepim.
Oh and on mimelib. Oh and on libkcal, which itself needs libical.
Oh and I forgot libksieve.
And if you're going to say: put all those together with kmail, then we need
to put korganizer and knode there too, since they use the same libs. And
in the end you end up with.... kdepim, exactly as it is today.

For development purposes the current dependency chain is much much better
than any further splitting. There's kdelibs, and there are modules depending on it.
Simple, easy.

I think the splitting should/could be done at packaging time: we could
provide splitted source tarballs, with one lib/app per tarball. I'm sure
someone (e.g. a packager) has scripts to do that, so if the release dude
agrees he could do this splitting when releasing. More work for one person,
less work for N packagers.... but think of the people downloading source tarballs
and having to run "./configure && make && make install" 500 times?
Good thing there's konstruct... I guess it would really become the only
way to build kde from source tarballs.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).