Separating everything ?

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

at Kevin's talk about KDE frameworks at FOSDEM last weekend, one guy from the 
audience asked why he should not use all KDE libs if he decides to use one 
already...

This got me thinking.
Obviously, dragging in everything is what we want to avoid.
Making kdelibs modular should also make building the libs easier. I mean, if 
I'm a developer under Windows and want to use only karchive, I "only" have to 
make sure zlib, bzip and lzma can be found, and I'm fine to go.
Orders of magnitude better than before, where I would have had to make sure 
enough from kdesupport can be found so I can start building kdelibs, including 
strigi, nepomuk, etc.

Still... the tier1 libraries will not have any interdependencies.
Especially the tier1 functional libs.
And they are partly really tiny.

If they don't have any interdependencies, it is trivial to add a cmake switch 
for each of them, so if I want only karchive, I simply disable all others.
Qxt does it similar IIRC.

Kevin actually suggested that breaking it into too many very small packages 
would indeed be quite some work for packagers.

So, what do I suggest ?
Let's put all tier1 function libs into one repository and package, making it a 
bit easier for the packagers (and also for developers, who have to deal with 
maybe 10 to 20 repositories less).

Or, just do that for tier1 functional libs, this is more narrow in scope.

I mean, what real benefit do we get from having a separate package for every 
tiny library ?

Comments ?

Alex