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On Wednesday 15 November 2006 3:57, Torsten Rahn (KDE) wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 14. November 2006 03:10 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> > cd burning is not a hard requirement for a basic desktop. neither is
> > digital camera software.
>
> What do you define as a hard requirement?=20

to quote my own email:

"i keep asking myself where these lines exist. i don't yet have a good answ=
er.=20
maybe one of you do. there are some obvious inclusions, but it gets fuzzy a=
t=20
the edges for me still."

with that disclaimer, as i see it:

a "basic desktop" is not the same thing as a "shippable desktop". we don't=
=20
ship a finished product. we create the pieces, identify them as best we can=
=20
("this is part of our libraries and has an ABI policy, this is one of our=20
core communications apps, this is an extragear app, ...") and the packagers=
=20
work with that (and us) to produce shippable products.

so a "basic desktop" would be, imo, "the basic unit upon which one would bu=
ild=20
a useful desktop for a given set of users".

not everyone does digital photography and only a subset of those use a=20
software manager for their photos. it's an outright rarity in office use. s=
o=20
it's certainly not a "basic desktop" component in that sense then.

more people may burn CDs, but then more people than that use word processor=
s=20
and yet we don't ship a word processor either. and some OSVs ship their own=
=20
custom cd burning software with kde rather than K3B. it's not an "indivisib=
le=20
part" of that thing we call the desktop.

i am, however, very concerned about document viewers (which includes pdf)=20
because they are IMHO a part of that "basic desktop" and this too is=20
reflected in the decisions made by packagers. who doesn't ship a pdf viewer=
=20
as part of a default desktop? how many distros write their own document=20
viewers? how many would -want- to?=20

can we afford to let a natural selection process happen in this case?

and would a natural selection process even "work" as it did with cd burning=
=20
titles given that the two applications look and function so similarly?

yes, it's a lot of judgement calls.

=2D-=20
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

=46ull time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)

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