Evaluation of the extragear tarball releases.

[Tom Albers]

Hi, 

For the rc2 and for the final release we've been creating tarballs of extragear applications. I've taken the time to evaluate this based on feedback with different packers. I will try to keep it short and to the point.

1)
The tarballs are now pretty much ok, the software to create them is committed in playground[1], so everyone can make them, when I'm unavailable. The only point is to include the translated documentation in the tarball. It's not done, because there are currently no examples to work with.

2)
The applications currently packaged[2] needs work. I discovered the following problems:

Ok: kgraphviewer, kphotoalbum(?), kmldonkey, kopete-cryptography, kaider, rsibreak
These applications seem maintained and ok. Although when kaider moves to trunk for the 4.1 release, there won't be any updates up to the release of 4.1.

Unmaintained: kcoloredit, kfax, kiconedit, kpovmodeler, ligature
These applications seem unmaintained (please correct me if I'm wrong!), I would like to remove them from the keg-release project. I would even like to suggest to Helio to contact the maintainers and remove them from extragear. I can do that too if wanted.

Own release schedule: ktorrent
KTorrent has made his own beta release between te rc2 and final keg tarballs we created. I think we should disable ktorrent from our release process for now, untill they indicate they want to join again.

During the removal of kdeaddons, some parts indicated that they should be part of this project, I just can not recall which one that was. It could be konq-plugins, but does anyone now the state of those?

3)
One of the bigger issues is the versioning. Because they are released with the kde release the internal version number of the application should be bumped as well. I would like to suggest to use the same numbering as the kde release they are part of. I've to discuss with some people how to do that, but I can add something like 'setVersion(4.0.1)' to a cmake file, and try to use that in the kaboutdata and when it's not set use the 'old' value.  Any ideas (or help with the execution) would be great.

Conclusion from my part is that we should continue this project and improve above points. Any comments about all the above is welcome. 

I will proceed with above in +/- two weeks if there are no objections.

Best,

Toma

[1] http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/utils/createtarball/
[2] http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/extragearReleases