what packages do we want distros to ship ?

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:46 AM, Alexander Neundorf <neundorf at kde.org> wrote:
> since I'm doing the build stuff I'm getting in contact with packagers from
> distributions and their wishes.
> One thing which I don't know what the current state is, is what type of KDE
> packages do we want distributions to ship ?
> We have the "modules" kdelibs, kdebase, kdepim etc. These are quite
> corse-grained.
> E.g. Slackware ships them that way, so you get  a package kdebase.tar.gz etc.#
>
> E.g. Gentoo is on the other end, they modify the buildsystem so that they can
> ship everything as a single package. E.g they'd like to have a separate
> package for each library in kdebase/workspace/.
>
> Now, we could say, it's up to them, we don't care.
> But that wouldn't be good. It would be better if we support what we want them
> to ship, so they have to do less (or no) modifications and we know what will
> be shipped to our users.
> Also making more fine-grained packages than whole-module-one-package can be
> made easier for them if we consider this when writing the CMakeLists.txt.
> (e.g. by keeping in mind that CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR and CMAKE_BINARY_DIR are
> different when building a whole module instead of independent, by making
> configure tests local to the application, etc.).
>
> So, what do we expect what will be shipped ?
>
> My guess is that it's somewhere in between, e.g. whole kdelibs, whole
> kdepimlibs, whole kdebase/workspace libs, but separate e.g. kontact, kate,
> kwin, kmail etc.

With Amarok 2 we've made it so that you can (in fact you must!) build
it from the extragear/multimedia/amarok directory, as opposed to
building it from the extragear/multimedia directory.

We figured that extragear applications are really separate entities
and most people aren't interested in building the whole shebang, when
they really just want one specific app.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org