KOffice Creativity Package name

[Cyrille Berger]

On Thursday 01 November 2007, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Thursday 01 November 2007 16:07:56 Cyrille Berger wrote:
> > That would probably
> > result in some changes in how tarball(s) are released
>
> I think its great if KOffice can be marketed directly to the artists and
> allow them to ignore KWord if they just want to use an artistic
> application.
As I said the word "office" is repealing to most artists with who we have 
discussed this issue. The word "office" is associated to the place where 
white collars spend their days, while artists tends to believe their work to 
be of a different nature and to happen in a "workshop" (or "studio" 
or "atelier").

> I fully agree that will have a positive effect. 
> To make sure this doesn't take away from the value a lot of people find
> with KOffice as a whole,
How this value can be affected ?
 
> I feel we should keep on releasing one tarball for 
> the whole of KOffice. As we have done for years now.
For years, KDE has released a kdebase tarball. Just to say that because 
something has been done for years doesn't mean it is still a good solution, 
even if it was. I also want to point out that the question and problem is 
very recent, Krita was only introduced in KOffice recently, and that is only 
since its introduction that artists have started to have a reason to be 
interested in KOffice.

> Afterall, artists that this effort targets are typically not going to
> download a tarball and compile anyway. 
No (well you can't imagine what some users that don't know what they are 
trying to do are capable of trying to do and usually failing, so some of them 
might be tempted to try) but they are going to look for the 
WhateverCoolNameForArtistsSuite package in their distribution.

> They want either deb/rpms or a simple installer.
And yes a deb or rpm or simple installer of the 
WhateverCoolNameForArtistsSuite.

> Very much like there is no need to release 10 tarballs because users want
> to install Krita without having to install KWord.
The way KOffice is packaged is very different in various distributions, 
ranging from a all-in-one package, to an everything is splitted (including 
plugins without correct dependencies, or even a very funny 
libkofficegrayau8colorspace5 in Mandriave 2008 :D ) to thematic grouping.

So while I know that you believe that we should leave packaging to 
distributions, I believe we need to be proactive (more than answer when an 
user have a problem with package X from distribution Y that he should use 
distribution Z because the packaging of KOffice is better). And that we need 
to be sure to have at least a meta package whose name is matching the one of 
the Creativity Suite, and while, I also believe that a meta package for the 
Productivity part would be welcome.


> > and on the website organisation as well.
>
> I think it would be wonderful to have a krita.org / krita.com.
Yes it would. Unfortunately it's unlikely to happen unless we find away to 
make the current owner to release it :( 

> Or a 
> OpenArt.org with karbon & krita on it.  Lots of ideas come to mind, for
> sure. Having those will not take away anything from the PR of KOffice we
> have been doing for quite some time.
>
> So, again, I love the idea, if you guys can pull it off, thats wonderful. 
> At the same time it should not affect the current message KOffice sends
> out. Just complement it.
Or clarify it. Because, trully, I have yet to find someone outside the KOffice 
project that understand the "message". I don't know anybody who hasn't ever 
asked me "but why Krita is part of an Office Suite ?"

And it's still possible to have that message while making a clear distinction 
between the targeted users. My favorite solution would have been to use a 
common "root" name between "office suite" and "creative suite" (more than 
just KDE). I do think that it would have been a good solution to make more 
clear the link between both, while directly showing each one its identity, 
but apparently it's not the solution adobted during last week-end meeting.

-- 
Cyrille Berger