what packages do we want distros to ship ?

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Tuesday 23 December 2008, David Johnson wrote:
> It's not up to KDE to decide "what packages do we want distros to ship".
> That's up to the distro. Packagers are perfectly capable of creating
> packages with whatever level of granularity they want. They're the ones who
> will decide how to split stuff up, what features to backport from trunk,
> what parts to leave out, what extras to include, etc. Some will want a
> single kdelibs package, while others may want to split it up into a dozen
> packages. KDE should not be trying to second guess them.
>
> It might save one distro a lot of work, but inadvertently create a lot more
> work for others.
>
> There is still great benefits into making things easier for distros. But
> that can be done with better docs, more build options, etc.

"More build options" - that's basically what I mean. If we provide them, it 
means work for somebody to implement them (probably me).
If we don't, they have to hack them up in some way.
Example:
e.g. the kate library in kdelibs.
If it's built as one we can simply do:

target_link_libraries(katepart .... kdecore)

and it will link to the correct libkdecore.so, since kdecore is a target in 
the same project.
If katepart would be built separately, we have to do something else.
We need to have a
find_package(KDE4)
somewhere (but which would find only part of kdelibs, i.e. without katepart, 
which will be somewhat strange), and then we could use either

target_link_libraries(katepart .... kdecore)
in KDE 4.2-style, since then kdecore would be an "imported" target with all 
properties set up, or
target_link_libraries(katepart .... ${KDE4_KDECORE_LIBS})
where all that is covered by the variable. 
Doing this consistently requires some work, and providing such a build option 
is not completely trivial.
I.e. if we provide it, it says "KDE wants the distros to ship such packages", 
if we don't, it means "KDE doesn't want to distros to ship such packages".
From that POV KDE decides to some part what distros will ship, and I doubt 
that packagers are "perfectly" capable of doing this without support from us.

Alex