On Thursday 19 April 2001 01:43, Dawit Alemayehu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I guess I will be the lone dissenter then on this issue.  My primary
> problem with this is that all that is being changed is that some of the
> non-essential, but perhaps useful packages are all being lumped together
> into one large package.  This is probably very convenient from our
> (developer/maintainers) point of view.  Specially for the person
> responsible for this package.  However, I cannot see how this is going to
> benefit the user who just wants to say get one of the konqueror plugins ?

Very good point.

> (S)He will be forced to download the whole package just to get a single
> io-slave or plugin or whatever.  This has been one of the biggest
> complaints by users about upgrading KDE and the reason I was asking for

Yes, I also hear this very often.
The users don't gain very much from our component technology if they can't 
update single components.

> putting all the io-slaves into one package on its own and asking user to
> download it separately.  For example, kdelibs can come only with the file
> io-slave and all the others will be packaged into two other kioslave
> packages, kioslave-basic and kioslave-extra or some similar name.  Then we
> can put ftp, http, pop, man, help and any other io-slaves to be used by
> most people into the basic package and remaining ones will go into the
> kioslave-extra package.
>
> I know the above setup will mean new dependencies for packagers and
> probably a PAT to originally adapt, but it will be mostly beneficial to the
> end user as (s)he will only need to update the necessary package for bug
> fixes in io-slaves or plugins or new icons or wallpapers etc etc.  Anyways,
> what I am getting at is that packaging addons or non-essential plugins etc
> into one large package IMHO is the wrong approach.

I second this.
Extra modules like: extra-ioslaves, extra-konq-plugins,  extra-kate-plugins, 
extra-theme-stuff (wallpapers, icons, sound) and so on would be better.

Maybe we should also think about a complete restructure of our packages, at 
least for KDE 3. This was discussed already very often. It is currently very 
hard to update single applications, e.g. konqy, kmail, konsole, whatever. I 
don't know how hard it would be to create release packages of single apps.

Bye
Alex