Terminology for Frameworks

Jos Poortvliet jos at opensuse.org
Tue Sep 24 08:09:45 UTC 2013


Going through the article explaining Frameworks to the world*
yesterday, I bumped into quite some inconsistent use of terms.

Right now, we mix up:
modules
components
frameworks
addons
libraries

For example in the article, we mostly talked 'modules' intermingled
with 'libraries', then suddenly started calling them addons and trow
in some 'components'

As Kevin pointed out, library is certainly wrong: each
framework/module CAN be multiple libraries (and even have binaries,
runtime components).

After a discussion with Sebas and Carl, I now made the article talk
about only 'Frameworks' and 'addons', the latter only in relationship
to Qt, as in the KDE frameworks being a set of addons to Qt.

I added the following text to our Frameworks 5 communication plan:

To  prevent using too many interchangable and confusing terms, please
try to stick to the following two: Frameworks and (Qt) addon. Use the
term 'Framework' (capitalized) to refer to an individual, independent
part of Frameworks 5 like KArchive or KIO. When explaining Frameworks,
it is OK to explain that it is the result of an modularization of the
older 'KDELIBS' and that one Framework offers one or more libraries
and sometimes runtime components to (combined) perform a specific
function.

See https://notes.kde.org/p/Frameworks5Communication

Feedback, as always, very much welcome.

Cheers,
Jos

* http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/25/frameworks-5


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