Concluding the discussion about splitting kdebase

[David Faure]

On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 11:25:57AM +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> 
> Ups, forgot, I have one last thing to ask about.
> 
> On Thursday 11 May 2006 22:27, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > * kdebase/coreapps:
> >
> > apps needed at runtime by all KDE apps, must also run under TWM and Windows
> >
> > - drkonqi
> > - kioslaves
> > - kdesu
> 
> kcmshell, residing in kdelibs, uses kdesu for loading KCModules in root mode. 
But kcmshell is a binary so it belongs to coreapps in fact.

> So this would create a dependency for kdelibs on coreapps, at runtime.
That's the whole idea of coreapps, yes. Runtime dependency.

> kdebase/coreapps is required for running any KDE application, right? So if one 
> wants to run a KDE application in any desktop environment one must install 
> kdelibs and kdebase-coreapps, that's my conclusion.
Yes.

> If the user can't get around not installing coreapps, why split it? Is the 
> only motivation lowered build time for those who develop against trunk and 
> who needs the latest changes in trunk?
Well, it's called kdelibs so we'd only put libs in it, that kind of makes sense to me ;)
See if I update kdelibs and e.g. kdeversion.h or kglobal.h changes, I don't see
why I should recompile all those runtime apps (which will still work) before
I can recompile whatever I'm working on like kdepim or koffice. Having only
libs in kdelibs minimizes the amount of recompilations necessary.

> The package layout affects the whole world(so to speak), while the change in 
> build time only affects a handful of us KDE developers.

Yes, but helping us work better helps kde become better.
For the rest of the world I don't see the problem with installing kdebase-coreapps,
they already do that (by installing kdebase). We're in fact making it easier
for distros to split up kdebase since we do it for them (to some extent).

> Also, if ones project 
> is dependent on central parts of KDE, I'd the chances are high one have to 
> re-build coreapps anyway, in order to have the app run properly.
Only if changing in incompatible ways, which is more rare than changing things
in compatible ways (especially after 4.0 will be out ;)

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