KDE apps non Windows and mac Was: Re: Kill KIO (was: Repositioning the KDE brand)

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Alexander Neundorf<neundorf at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 July 2009, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> Em Terça-feira 14 Julho 2009, às 16:19:07, Boudewijn Rempt escreveu:
> ...
>> > > What could be considered wrong is if there's a nice feature that
>> > > doesn't depend on anything of the "platform-y" stuff. If that's the
>> > > case, then it should be moved upstream through the libraries. (Or the
>> > > case of features that do depend on those things, but for silly reasons,
>> > > like our locale formatting routines requiring KConfig)
>>
>> KDE libs, IMHO, should remain focussing on "the best desktop".
>>
>> And, that said, I also believe KDE applications should be "the best
>> applications" and that may mean deviating from the platform where
>> necessary. Therefore, I do want Krita to be the best app you can get on Mac
>> and Windows. And if that brings in kded, klauncher and the D-Bus daemon, so
>> be it.
>
> I think we have a problem if even Boudewijn sees it as a problem to depend on
> KDE libraries on non-Linux.
> I can/could understand this concern in KDE 2/3 days, but with KDE 4 we should
> be able to make that work smoothly, now that Qt is LGPL everywhere and our
> software is (more or less) fully portable.
>
> How can we do that ? I don't know. I think the Windows and Mac developers need
> to help here.
> Maybe provide a dead-easy to install "KDE environment" package which brings
> everything you need to run a full blown KDE application ?

This is quite off-topic here but still:

On Windows, I have been suggesting for a long time we make
redistributable packages for kdelibs (for instance, "kdelibs 4.3
redistributable runtime") which includes kdelibs and all its
depencencies. The same goes for kdepimlibs and kofficelibs.

Add side-by-side assemblies (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly ) features to those
redistributables and now you can have kate for kde 4.3 installed and
okular for kde 4.4 installed and you only need a single copy of
kdelibs in your system for all the applications.

We would still have the problem of the third-party dependencies for
kdebase applications, kdegraphics, applications, etc. As creating so
many redistributable runtime packages would be a bit confusing and
tedious to users installing KDE applications, IMHO the kdelibs
redistributable should include all the dependencies for all the
applications in kdebase, kdegraphics, etc.

What I am proposing is certainly not the best solution (it takes an
awful lot of space) but at least it makes distributing a KDE
application on Windows easier than now (the KDE on Windows installer
works very well but it's very confusing to users). It would be a
matter of checking if the KDE 4.3 redistributable package is installed
and if it's not, tell the user to download and install it, just like
Microsoft does for Visual C++ 2005, 2008, etc.

As for updating applications, we could have a KDE Update applet, like
Google, Real Player, etc have (for instance, using Google Update
Engine: http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/ )

There are issues with DBus to implement this approach in case you have
two KDE runtimes installed (e. g. KDE 4.3 and KDE 4.4) but when I
talked about this with Holger Schöder at GCDS, he told me they should
be solvable.

The only reason I have not implemented what I'm proposing is currently
I'm too busy with work. In fact, I would not be able to start with
that until October, which may mean these will not be ready until KDE
4.5.

I don't know what's the situation in Mac but I guess a similar
approach (distributing 2-3 huge packages with all the required
libraries, daemons, etc) might also work.

> Isn't that issue somewhat similar to programs installing their own copy of the
> JRE ? For them it's usually no problem.

AFAIK, most applications will tell you to install the latest JRE
version from Sun. Only a few dinosaurs (OpenOffice.org, Oracle and so)
would install their own version.


-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)