Move kppp away from kdenetwork

[Eckhart Wörner]

Hi Albert,

maybe I should explain myself more.

Am Sonntag, 15. August 2010, 22:55:00 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> Unless you have data saying it doesn't work, what's the reason of removing
> something someone might be using, remember KDE is used my millions of
> people.

in the last years, especially with the first release of the 4 series, we 
removed a lot of things people were actually using. Remember, KDE Software is 
used by millions of people, so every feature is used by someone, therefore 
this argument shouldn't count. ;-)

Now, first I want to remind you that I didn't ask to delete the software 
permanently. With revision control, this would be difficult. ;-) I just stated 
the fact that kppp is totally unmaintained, and got little love in the last 
few years, i.e. basically it is bit-rotting. I also think maintaining kppp is 
quite tedious, so it's unlikely a lot of people will step up for its 
maintainership (ever wondered how many of those provider files are outdated?) 
Putting it into the unmaintained corner of svn would therefore only be stating 
the obvious. Maybe someone then gets compelled to revive kppp, which alone 
would make this proposal a success. :-)

Now why am I against keeping kppp in the KDE Software Compilation? I believe 
this compilation shouldn't be a random assortment of things, but form a 
coherent experience. With our 4.5 release, we bundled great networking for the 
first time. Next to that, kppp looks totally out of place: it uses a different 
UI, it doesn't work well together with the remaining networking (try sharing 
your dial-up connection via wireless, try IPv6, try disabling networking 
completely...).

Furthermore, in my eyes the Software Compilation consists of software that 
most people would find useful in their day-to-day desktop experience - 
essential things like a mail program or mini-games. Now at the time of writing 
kppp, it certainly belonged into that category, however, time changed things, 
and today I don't believe kppp belongs to that category anymore.

Another way of detecting what belongs into the Software Compilation is to see 
what other people think of this. For this reason I asked a bit in IRC 
yesterday, and found out that the FreeBSD packagers don't even package kppp 
anymore - probably a sign that they think about this the same way I do.

In fact, I'm a bit surprised by unambiguity of the reactions on my mail: all 
the people I asked about this for the last few months agreed to this point of 
view. (Please don't take this as an argument, it was merely too check whether 
my proposal looked sane to other people.)

Hopefully this makes things clearer.

Eckhart