Kill KIO (was: Repositioning the KDE brand)

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Sunday 12 July 2009, Harri Porten wrote:

> What I find more sad is that a KDE dependency is always treated like
> pestilence - even on KDE lists. People go out of their way to rewrite
> things, dumb them down instead of simply linking against a library that is
> already available. "Qt-only" is a misnomer anyway as e.g. QtGui links
> against lots of other libraries already. If the feeling is that e.g. KIO
> is too hard to distribute without pulling in all of kdelibs then more
> modularization would be the way to go imo.

I definitely think that much more modularization is needed. Because the 
libraries are intertwined instead of being like the teeth of a comb, separate, 
independent and providing just one thing, you need most of the kdelibs which 
makes it hard to cut down the size of your application, which is needed for 
some platforms.

Plus, the need for things like dbus, knotify and other things are rather a 
chore, especially on OSX, Windows or constrained platforms like Maemo. Those 
make packaging harder. I can create an installer for a Qt-only application for 
three platforms easily; making a self-contained package for a KDE application 
is much harder.

For me, KDE as a development platform only really works when developing for a 
Unix desktop environment, and when I want to have my applications available on 
other platforms, I'll gladly trade down to Qt-only, losing some of the KDE 
smarts in return for ease of deployment and less memory usage.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org