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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Proposal: package split
From:       Harri Porten <porten () tu-harburg ! de>
Date:       1999-10-02 13:11:06
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Hi !

This has bugging me quite for a while now and I would like to hear some
comments and counter arguments on this:

Proposal:

kdelibs and kdebase stay intact but the other packages are SPLIT UP into
smaller entities, i.e. the contained applications.

Reasoning:

a) we now have several apps doubling the functionality of others. Why
not give developers of all these mailers and sirc clients etc. a chance
to compete with others. Users should have the opportunity to freely
choose whatever apps they like for a specific task. Competition will be
good. If I look at other RPMs on my distributions CD I can't spot other
monster collections like ours.

b) development of different apps move at different paces. Some apps
don't change at all for a year because they are either feature complete
(and bug free) or unmaintained. I hate to tell users to fetch the 3 MB
kdenetwork to get the latest kppp version. cvsup is nothing for the
casual user I would say. I would expect shorter release & feedback
cycles if smaller entities can easily be distributed.

c) better platform adaptation. Why deliver the whole kdeadmin sources if
only Linux users can take full advantage of it (e.g. ksysctrl). The
portability of specialized apps could be clearly stated on a web page.

Disadvantages:

CVS maintenance nightmare ? Stephan will probably kill me. Note that I'm
not necessarily talking about a split into more modules. If some
intelligent script does the breakup for the tar packages only that would
be fine with me.

Dependency nightmare ? One of KDE's advantages (as can be seen in
comparison to Gnome for example) is the easy installation. However, if
kdelibs and kdebase are not broken up I don't see any problems.

More ?

Harri.

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