I "like" Mandriva's attitude (Fwd: Re: well-known user folders, a proposal)

[Torsten Rahn]

On Thursday 22 February 2007 21:11:24 Kevin Krammer wrote:
> I was just angry that Mandriva again(!) managed to patch KDE before using
> the already present customization option.

Sorry to tell you, but just claiming that this is solely Mandriva's fault 
falls to short IMHO.

If you expect that distributors and system integrators will always follow 
KDE's default solution then there would need to be a reason for doing that.

An obvious reason would be "KDE's suggested solution that is shipped by 
default is the best solution and it's also the best documented one".

Unfortunately from an external point of view this claim would be far away from 
reality.

We still ship a lot of "solutions" as a default selection that 95% of the 
distributors have to exchange, add upon or have to remove for each release. 
Think of "Noatun". How many distributors do ship Noatun as a multimedia 
player that is selected by default? Almost none. How many magazines did I see 
that reported about it recently? Almost none. How often does it appear in 
polls as one of the most popular multimedia players? Almost never. So how 
attractive is that "choice" for distributors? With Amarok being the most 
popular multimedia player it obviously doesn't make sense to distributors to 
select it by default.
With such shipping policies and lack of easy to find documentation of our 
suggested solutions they will certainly question every decision we make and 
often enough come up with their "better" solution.

So even if there exists a reason why the KDE Project prefers to go for a 
solution that might not be the most appealing one for distributors ( 
like "Amarok doesn't want to be shipped as part of KDE" or "Charles is a 
great guy and we like Noatun anyways" :-)  we would need to document that 
better.

So as already pointed out we need a central point that is easy to find for 
people who want to customize KDE (we already have several but nothing I'd 
consider easy to browse through and where you can find practically relevant 
stuff easily).

Concerning Mandriva: I think Mandriva has done a lot for KDE and is still 
doing a lot for us (think of Nepomuk just as a single example). Even more so 
if you think about the fact that they have also got to earn money. They 
simply can't research why everything that they would like to see different is 
done differently in KDE or whether it can be changed through some obscure 
non-documented way because they don't have enough time to do so and sometimes 
expect implementing their own solution to cost less time and therefore less 
money.

If you want to improve upon the situation the best solution is 
1.) either making KDE more appealing for distributors by improving KDE and its 
documentation for distributors and system integrators/administrators

2.) or by contacting Mandriva (we have good contacts there), finding out 
what's wrong and go back to 1.)

Seriously, flaming on kde-core-devel doesn't help in this case.

Torsten





 


> I guess the have some kind of company policy that requires them to be
> incompatible at all cost, maybe reusing the one Redhat used to have :-/
>
> > in kdeglobals should do it. boy do we need a "customizing kde for sys
> > admins and system integrators" catalog somewhere....
>
> Now that would be great
>
> Cheers,
> Kevin



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 Torsten Rahn
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