Office/ and Utilities/ menu reorganization

Matthias Welwarsky matze at stud.fbi.fh-darmstadt.de
Mon Aug 8 19:51:12 BST 2005


On Monday 08 August 2005 20:15, Andras Mantia wrote:
> On Monday 08 August 2005 20:56, Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
> > On Monday 08 August 2005 18:34, Andras Mantia wrote:
> > > On Monday 08 August 2005 18:06, Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
> > > > If applications are less important or immature they should not be
> > > > shipped by default. Just release them separately.
> > >
> > > That's not a real solution for the "less important" applications.
> >
> > Depends on how you define "less important".
>
> Right,
>
> > Yes. It's pure developer convenience. So for whom do we make KDE now,
> > again?
>
> But who creates KDE in first place? The KDE svn modules should help the
> developers...

... which is just a minor technical problem that can be solved otherwise. For 
extragear it seems to work, no? For example, I don't see a problem in 
disbanding kdeutils and moving the applications to extragear. There they find 
the proper environment to be translated, released and packaged separately. 
I'm sure the same logic can be applied to a lot of other apps in KDE.

> > > And of course which is not so important for 80% of the users might
> > > be very important for the rest.
> >
> > That's why KDE is usually perceived as being "cluttered". Really, we
> > need to find a better criterium for "releasing an application with
> > KDE" than just "it might be useful for a few users".
>
> This is the same what you wrote: "depends on how you define "less
> important". Who will decide that an application is not that important?
> This is not much different than getting rid of "not so important"
> features.

It is the user who decides what is important to him, not the developer. So the 
user should have the choice, and the developer should make the choice easy.

> > Next I'll hear that we just provide the source and packaging is a
> > distributor task and that svn modules don't have anything to do with
> > packaging and yadda yadda.
>
> Right, you will hear it.

But I never hear any argument to support that other than "because it's more 
convenient for us that way", which is kind of lame.

> > At this point you usually get flamed over your choice of linux
> > distribution: "Why don't you use kubuntu, gentoo, debian,
> > <something>, suse is such a crap anyway". I don't want to switch
> > distributions just to have a sane KDE installation.
>
> Don't switch, but request SUSE to package them in an other way.

... which in turn will not happen unless it's made easy for them. And until 
then KDE will be judged by the impression the distributor decides to generate 
instead of what we think it should be. So we're totally fine with letting 
other, less qualified people decide what KDE is, because maintaining the 
status quo is so much easier.


-- 
From the 'Handbook of Corporate Slang':

- to protect prior investment (phrase):
    describes the inability to revert a wrong decision made
    in the past, expresses willingness of throwing 
    good money after bad. (q.v. Fiorina, C.)




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