Help make the KDE Platform modular, instead of complicating each single KDE program (was: Re: Filelight into kdereview (again))

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Wednesday 29 September 2010, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> Mardi, le 28 septembre 2010, à 19:10, Nick Shaforostoff a écrit:
> > 2010/9/28 Martin Sandsmark <sandsmark at samfundet.no>:
> > > I'd rather you spend your time making it easier for people to get
> > > kdelibs on Windows if you care about Windows, as this will also benefit
> > > other KDE applications (like KTorrent and KMail and whatnot else I
> > > imagine Windows people would like).
> >
> > I ran kdewin installer. Just selecting a simple app like kate triggers
> > installing a lot of packages I don't need, like mysql, soprano,
> > phonon.
> >
> > If I want to show filelight to a typical windows user, he would reject
> > this when he sees the huge (also in terms of disk space) package list
> > that is needed for it.
>
> Easy to fix: just comment out the call in the installer code which makes it
> shown to the user ;) And blame the time needed to download on a poor
> internet connection.
>
> > I believe users need filelight to clean their hard drives, not to fill
> > it with megabytes of some software ;)
>
> Hehe :) Still, I agree, the same is true also for those who want to use
> other KDE programs like Kate, or that pretty simple hex editor from
> kdeutils (kdesdk starting with 4.6) </promo>, on those systems already
> equipped with some (native) GUI/environment stack. Hard to explain that one
> has to install also half of the stack of our platform, especially as all

Yes, that's basically the problem we have on Windows.

There are the platform profiles since KDE 4.5, which are 
AFAIK "Desktop", "Tablet" and "Mobile".

I don't know the details, but "Desktop" is the full thing, "Tablet" is less, 
and "Mobile" is even less.
Some more info is here:
http://home.kde.org/~akademy10/slides/KDE_Platform_Profiles_-_Low_fat_software_platform_you_can_pick_and_choose_from_with_sugar_coating_on_top-Kevin_Ottens.pdf

*Maybe* would it make sense to e.g. target the "Tablet" platform for 
Filelight, which as I understand, would have less dependencies ?

Same could be true maybe OSX, but somehow I feel there it is a bit less of an 
issue.

What's the current state of the platform profiles ?
Does that make sense what I wrote ?

Alex