Office/ and Utilities/ menu reorganization

[Christoph Cullmann]

On Tuesday 09 August 2005 16:47, Matthias Welwarsky wrote:
> > 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?
Tell me how that should happen? Let's say Dirk fixes there a gcc 4 problem, or me fixes there
some workaround for old kde stuff or introduces a wishlist item the app has, have I now to package the app
to show up a new release? Have I to contact the maintainer if any? You don't get the point that there are many
little apps which are useful, but which have no that big team like popular apps like k3b or amarok.

> 
> > > 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.
I proposed to split them out like extragear, but to still follow releases with this apps, unlike extragear,
with automagic packaging like atm. Than distros can easy build packages for each app on their own and
people will only end up with the apps they install.

> > 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.
But kruler won't exist as standalone app, who will maintain it?

> 
> > 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!".
Sure, but why force again that whole release managment, why not just say, yeah, we create a 
extragear like apps module which will follow the releases and fine, people can stuff in their stuff there,
we have best of both worlds, the apps there are still released as tarballs with the kde releases, they are 
easy to split, as the extragear apps with the same scheme, and all are happy, or do I miss something?

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