[Kde-scm-interest] Package splitting

[Matt Williams]

2010/1/26 Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org>:
> A Dimarts, 26 de gener de 2010, Troy Unrau va escriure:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I'm not really involved, nor do I particularly care what SCM KDE is
>> using - that's not the reason I'm here. I do however hope that we can
>> kill two birds with one stone, and that's the package splitting
>> monster. If it's reasonable to accomplish at the same time as the git
>> transition, it'd be nice to be able to split out the kde applications
>> into separate packages. My motivation for such is two-fold:
>>
>> 1) We have a mess right now with each distro splitting KDE in a
>> more-or-less unique way, except slackware. This makes it hard to
>> recommend packages to users when doing tech support.
>> 2) From a marketing perspective, we'd like to start marketing the
>> various KDE applications independently, which requires that they are
>> easier to obtain as stand-alone apps. In other words, we'd like to be
>> able to offer a download of Okular by itself, for instance, since
>> Okular is good enough to sell itself.
>>
>> I realize that this tips into the release management stuff somewhat as
>> well, but hopefully most of them are on this list. Secondly, I know
>> that it would create a lot of additional work during the transition,
>> but I'd make an argument that it's better to have a major break to
>> workflow once (git+splitting) versus twice (once for git, once later
>> for splitting).
>
> This has two disadavantages:
>  * Kills the belonging to a group (my app is part of kdeedu so i belong the
> kdeedu community)
>  * Makes it imposible to depend on internal/shared libraries, e.g. some libs
> in kdebase/workspace/libs are used by kdebase applications but its headers are
> not installed.

Not necessarily aimed at you Albert but I have a question.

What are we going to do about being able to move applications from one
KDE logical project to another? e.g., how will we be able to move a
new application from playground to kdereview to kdegames while
preserving history? Is the plan to have a kdegames repository with
each of the games stored as submodules? From what I've understood,
submodules aren't currently up to doing this? Perhaps someone can
elaborate?

I _was_ in favour of having separate repos for each application but I
agree with you about dependencies on internal libraries (e.g.
libkdegames) being much less neat in that case.

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com