Okular moving

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 15 November 2006 3:57, Torsten Rahn (KDE) wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 14. November 2006 03:10 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> > cd burning is not a hard requirement for a basic desktop. neither is
> > digital camera software.
>
> What do you define as a hard requirement? 

to quote my own email:

"i keep asking myself where these lines exist. i don't yet have a good answer. 
maybe one of you do. there are some obvious inclusions, but it gets fuzzy at 
the edges for me still."

with that disclaimer, as i see it:

a "basic desktop" is not the same thing as a "shippable desktop". we don't 
ship a finished product. we create the pieces, identify them as best we can 
("this is part of our libraries and has an ABI policy, this is one of our 
core communications apps, this is an extragear app, ...") and the packagers 
work with that (and us) to produce shippable products.

so a "basic desktop" would be, imo, "the basic unit upon which one would build 
a useful desktop for a given set of users".

not everyone does digital photography and only a subset of those use a 
software manager for their photos. it's an outright rarity in office use. so 
it's certainly not a "basic desktop" component in that sense then.

more people may burn CDs, but then more people than that use word processors 
and yet we don't ship a word processor either. and some OSVs ship their own 
custom cd burning software with kde rather than K3B. it's not an "indivisible 
part" of that thing we call the desktop.

i am, however, very concerned about document viewers (which includes pdf) 
because they are IMHO a part of that "basic desktop" and this too is 
reflected in the decisions made by packagers. who doesn't ship a pdf viewer 
as part of a default desktop? how many distros write their own document 
viewers? how many would -want- to? 

can we afford to let a natural selection process happen in this case?

and would a natural selection process even "work" as it did with cd burning 
titles given that the two applications look and function so similarly?

yes, it's a lot of judgement calls.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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