modular kdelibs: packagers' view

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi all,

I'm writing this email from the Platform11 sprint in Randa, and I'd like to 
collect input how we can get the different needs of developers and packagers 
together.

Let me quickly outline the situation. There has been a trend and desire to 
ship kdelibs (and other parts of our development platform, I'm just writing 
kdelibs here for convenience) as separate libraries, the reasons for this are: 

 * can be individually consumed by 3rd party developers, no either or decision   
   for kdelibs, helps 3rd party adoption
 * kdelibs' purpose is not anymore just desktop, mobile use cases become more 
   important, more modularity helps to create leaner systems

If we end up doing this, it has two important ramifications:

 * More individual packages, might create extra work for packagers, depending 
   on their tools
 * Change in package's structures

While the consequences for developers can be kept rather low, it *will* mean 
some restructuring of existing packages.

I see a couple of things we can do here:

 * Provide "traditional" tarballs, leading to relatively little disruption, 
   but means duplication as we provide different sets of tarballs that 
   overlap, might be more confusing than worth it

 * Do the split once, try to prevent the git migration mess where we've 
   clearly not thought through the ramifications for release management, which 
   lead to much confusion and frustration among packagers

As we haven't taken any firm decisions, I'd like to invite input from you, to 
see how we can accommodate your workflows and keep the extra work for those 
packaging low. Please do keep in mind that those changes are necessary for KDE 
to move on, since modularizing our platform is an entirely useless effort, if 
those changes aren't reflected in the form they end up on most developers' 
machines.

Thanks for your input already. Also please don't wait too long with your 
feedback, since it's essential for ongoing discussions here at Platform11. I 
will be collecting the input and taking it into the discussions going on here. 
(There are some packagers present, but obviously we should give everyone the 
chance to provide input.)

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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