kde plasma workspace structure

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday, June 9, 2012 02:22:43 Alex Fiestas wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 12:11 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Friday, June 8, 2012 22:54:03 Alex Fiestas wrote:
> > we have kde-baseapps, and i agree what you've said previously that wewould
> > benefit from having a defined set of "core applications"
> 
> Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking with the idea of an
> Operating System in mind rather than with the Workspace because; what
> is a workspace anyway? Alone what does it solve? Makes any sense
> create a Workspace?

there is merit to thinking on a larger scale. however, there are dangerous 
places the "we're making an OS!" idea can lead as we've seen in other f/oss 
projects, such as:

* sinking lots of your resources into (reinventing) middleware instead of 
using what works and is there. one of the great things about being able to 
focus on one part of the stack is efficiency due to division of labor.

* losing portability to non-Linux (and even specific Linux OSes)

* forgetting that applications may wish to run on other OSes

so as long as we can avoid these kinds of pitfalls, thinking big picture is 
very useful. :)

(btw, the proprietary OSes also have desktop workspaces and developers who 
work exclusively on them. those developers have to work with their kernel and 
user space development teams much as we do. there isn't as much different 
between what we do and they do in that way. major differences are they do it 
hidden behind closed doors and we have more variety.)

> This is something we have struggled with historically, kmix is not in
> kde-workspace because at some point somebody considered that a
> Workspace "can live" without a sound mixer.

this actually goes back to at least kde2. 

we used to have a kdebase module. for the 4.0 release, that was split up and 
you'll now find bits of it in kde-runtime, kde-baseapps and kde-workspace.

when we had kdebase, we also had the kdemultimedia module where *everything* 
multimedia related went. it was expected that if you installed kdelibs+kdebase 
you'd also install kdemultimedia, because then you'd have a complete system. 
(ditto for the other repositories)

over time applications grew (in size as well as number) and this simple 
division between modules made less sense. (kdenetwork was probably the first to 
show these problems.) and now the we have a module for the workspaces, things 
like kmix being in a "multimedia" module makes less and less sense. ;)

so nobody actually decided kmix doesn't belong in the workspace. kind of the 
opposite: the workspace and applications became more clearly defined as their 
own things and some pieces, like kmix, just weren't taken care of and floated 
off.

i agree that it makes sense to drag kmix into kde-workspace since it really 
only makes sense in that scope. every other desktop has their own mixer, 
right? so there's no reason for someone to use kmix elsewhere. (unlike, say, 
digikam or gwenview.) 

that would cause some rethinking of the module structure as the question would 
then be "what's the point of kdemultimedia?", but that's probably long overdue 
as well :)

kmix really ought to integrate with the desktop shell a lot better than it 
currently does and that means a revisit of the UI (which has gotten worse 
rather than better imho ...) the UI we have now is essentially the same UI 
(with various regressions) we had in KDE2. the internals are rather better, so 
there has been progress, just not so much on the bits you can see :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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