Thoughts on Krita website presentation

[Cyrille Berger]

Hi,

First, I would like to note that you are not forced to install all of KOffice 
to get Krita. A few distribution do indeed deliver only one package for all 
KOffice (mostly BSDs nowdays and in OpenSUSE, krita is bundled with karbon) 
but most distributions splits the package. Then Krita only depends on the 
library.

> I must agree...    I've never used any other aspect of Koffice, and
> probably won't --- I have MS Office on my machine via cross-over.   I
> admit that I initially thought a little less of Krita since it was 'the
> drawing package of Koffice'...     I'd never attempt to use the drawing
> package of openoffice to do anything real, and so I wasn't tempted to
> use Krita...

This is because OOo have a short term vision, and they are obsessed by making 
sure that Writer beats Word, which means the other components receive less 
love. While I do believe that a good image processing application which works 
nicely and integrates with a good word processing is a benefit for both 
applications.

> I'm discovering now that it rivals and exceeds the  
> Gimp in many aspects.
Good :)

> I'm curious --- how many of the Koffice components does Krita depend on?
Quiet a lot in 1.6 and it's increasing in 2.0. For 1.6 it's mostly 
architecture (file import/export system, UI, documents...). But for 2.0, it's 
increasing, the color management library is shared, rich text editing and 
vector layers will be provided by other KOffice components, etc...

But even in 2.0, Krita will be able to be installable as stand alone.

> but even if we don't remove the dependancies --- I think having more of
> an 'independent' mind-set for Krita might gain more attention.

As a marketing point of view, I think we should more make the emphasie for 
KOffice on the two sets of application, Productivity and Creativity. While 
Krita is currently the flagship of KOffice Creativity, and Karbon doesn't 
have enought developers to rival with the bigger player, I do think that 
having both application able to use the feature of the other one is a strong 
added value for the user.

And the single reason why Krita will be able to use the vector graphics 
capabilities of Karbon, is because they both use a library which is part of 
kolib.

So if your distribution is forcing you to install all of KOffice just for 
Krita, you might want to report it as a bug to them.
-- 
Cyrille Berger