Office/ and Utilities/ menu reorganization

[Christoph Cullmann]

On Monday 08 August 2005 21:21, Michael Nottebrock wrote:
> I.e. create a tarball every once in a while and make it available for download 
> somewhere (and KDE could simply provide ktown-access/space to keg-application 
> developers for that purpose). That's hardly stressful compared to developing 
> and maintaining an application in the first place.
For small apps, that is most stressful, small apps will perhaps only need few lines changes per kdelibs/qt release to
keep the user happy (e.g. to fix regressions with the new versions, to adopt to some little new stuff, to fix bugs),
than you have to made a tarball, notifiy the translators if a string change was done, ....

> 
> > The translators and documentation writers would have to keep track of
> > yet-another-release-schedule.
> 
> Perhaps a translator or documentation writer could comment on that. The way I 
> see it, it would actually reduce the workload of the *KDE* translators and 
> documentation writers and possibly even improve the 
> translation/documentations of the respective individual applications, because 
> they would attract their own, more focused crowd of translators and 
> documentation writers.
For some apps that might be true, pointing to Kopete, KMail, ...., they are popular, fancy, whatever, but smallers apps
won't attract translators from all languages, like kde does as whole now, beside if the current i18n teams stay looking at
all these apps, but than they will even have more work, as all apps may release independently, much harder to plan in your
sparetime for 10 moving targets.

> > Users who build from sources would have to keep track of
> > more packages, 
> 
> How so? Kdelibs would be a constant requirement, third party libraries or 
> similar stuff users need to keep track of no matter which configure script 
> looks for them. I can see how finding applications to download and compile in 
> the first place require a little extra effort from users, but again this 
> could be very much mitigated by allowing extragear developers to host their 
> distribution tarballs on KDE.org's mirrors and/or adding them to konstruct 
> (if konstruct doesn't already include extragear, I don't use it so I don't 
> know).
> 
> > new dependencies
> 
> See above.
Kile need kdvi, kghostview, kpdf to be actually usable for example, atm, that means, compiling kdegraphics,
if we would split, that would mean compile these three apps, just as an example ;)

> 
> > new build orders, etc.
> 
> Can't follow you here either.
> 
> Please note that I'm not at all proposing to get rid of all or even one single 
> KDE module. Some KDE modules have, over time, developed into a collection of 
> applications which are very tightly integrated and which cannot really 
> sensibly developed or released piecemeal. A prime example of such a module is 
> kdepim.
> 
> Other modules have not developed in that direction however and are still more 
> or less random collections of software of a certain theme, often with 
> strongly competing extragear or other non-mainline applications available 
> like kdeutils, kdenetwork and kdemultimedia. It's those modules where I'd use 
> the big broom on first. 
> 
> I'm also of the (very much subjective, admittedly) opinion that kdegames and 
> kdeedu are probably eating away a good deal of developer resources 
> (especially in the translation, documentation and art department) while they 
> don't add much to KDE as a whole - and that they are disproportionally large. 
> Sure, they make KDE the leading desktop environment when it comes to the 
> number of games and educational software included by default, but I'm not 
> convinced that KDE gains terribly much of an advantage over its competitors 
> through that.
Why they eat away resources? No developer is forced to spend it's time there. And no translator is really forced to translate
it, or I am wrong? It is the aim to provide as complete translations as possible, but some untranslated docu in kdeedu would be no showstopper there
, or? In my eyes kdeedu is a really important aspect of the KDE environment, as that are apps which you can use at schools and in normal families.

-- 
Christoph Cullmann
KDE Developer, kde.org Maintainance Team
http://www.babylon2k.de, cullmann at kde.org