Office/ and Utilities/ menu reorganization

[Matthias Welwarsky]

On Tuesday 09 August 2005 16:10, Maks Orlovich wrote:
> > Let's face it, what we're talking about is abandonware. If there is a
> > maintainer for an app, all this is a non-issue, because someone is
> > actively taking care of it. It's not like applications get fixed
> > magically if they happen to be inside a module. Someone is doing it.
>
> Actually, they often get fixed by a KDE contributor /exactly/ because
> they're an official part of KDE. For example, I've fixed quite some
> kiconedit and kbattleship bugs in the past, and I don't have any relation
> to the apps. And kdegames in particular often gets quite a bit of bugfixing
> by people who are not maintainers.

Tell me again, why would this not happen anymore if kbattleship was in 
extragear instead of a monolithic games module?

> > Let's say I just want kuickshow. With the current suse packaging, I have
> > no chance to install it alone, its packaged together with kiconedit,
> > kolourpaint and kview. The module itself even contains a provray model
>
> Eh, and so what? Disk space is cheap. The only thing that's a downside is
> security updates, but there are ways of addressing that that are not
> workarounds.

It's not about disk space. It's about that 95% of the users getting lost in 
stuff they won't ever need nor understand that it could be useful for anyone, 
and KDE being constantly bashed over being a big mess.

> > editor! What's the chance of me wanting to have that installed? Or take
> > kcolorchooser. I'm sure it's a nice tool for a web developer, but for 95%
> > of the people it just clutters the start menu, and who actually has a use
> > for kruler?

> Actually, kruler is quite useful for things like style development, khtml
> development, etc.. And I'd never /know/ such a thing existed if it didn't
> ship with kdegraphics, and many distributions would probably say the same
> thing you did and not ship it. Similarly, kcolorchooser is also often of
> those little things that people might not look for, but which are extremely
> useful in some circumstances. (I think kiconedit can probably go away since
> kolourpaint is more powerful now, I think, but I think someone considered
> doing something to it)

OK, one out of 1000 users might need kruler someday and therefore it has to be 
installed for all 1000 of them. Plus, I don't believe that you would never 
have known kruler. Somebody would have told you sooner or later.

> In any way, I am going quite against the grain here when I say that I think
> what you're suggesting (and what packages are doing) is a grave mistake. I
> believe the current KDE package structure is a big strength, as it makes it
> easy to have a desktop that has all the functionality a person will likely
> ever need (and yes, I think k3b ought to be in kdemultimedia), so the
> people can /work/ and not play update-the-package or find-the-app.

Nobody needs _all_ of the functionality of KDE. Today people work with 
distributions, it's not all "Linux From Scratch" anymore. And it's not like 
users don't discover these applications, maybe not immediately, but hey, 
there are mailing lists, forums, websites, there's kde-look.org, 
kde-apps.org, extragear.kde.org, IRC channels where people hang out talking 
about KDE. KDE applications are featured in print magazines! I think k3b even 
won a price one time. No need to stomp their noses into the start menu 
yelling "eat that!".

>
> -Maks

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