Splitting up KDE apps

woodstock · 2005-01-14 19:44:39

You can find most if not all major KDE apps as seperate packages on www.kde-apps.org

My question to you, the Arch and current KDE maintainer(s) is would there be any objection if I put together seperate PKGBUILDS for the major apps like Kopete and the works?

I'm asking first, because I don't want to waste my time if it's going to be frowned at.

My reasoning is to make KDE feel less bloated, in terms of having apps installed that some users would never have to use... I also understand that to accomplish this I would have to split up some of the kdelibs from the main packages for these programs to work on their own, as they do rely on libs contained in their respected packages.

Comments, ideas, help are all welcome.

lucke · 2005-01-14 21:57:02

That's the thing that annoys me about KDE the most. I just hate it, when I want to install one or two progs from the given group, but the only choice for me is to install whole pack of programs and remove the needless ones from the KDE menu and file associations afterwards. Honestly, I came to think, that there are only packages groups available at kde.org - but I'm usually lost when browsing that site and I can't find any decent info about anything there, so it's not a big deal :-) Concluding, it would be really kewl, if anyone could take care of that matter and create separate packages.

Cheers,

lucke

ps. Damn, does this post look as complicated and hard to understand as it does to me? :-)

woodstock · 2005-01-14 22:15:46

lol, don't worry it looks fine .

I got this idea when I was playing around with Debian and noticed that this is how the KDE maintainer(s) for Debian do it. Plus from my understanding this is what Debian does to all of the packages for their system.

They break everything down as much as possible to give the user the most flexibility similiar to how Gentoo uses USE Flags in portage. In Debian's case it's different in the sense that obviously if binary based and that instead of stating which USE Flags you want to use, you simply apt-get the extra pieces you want. Though this isn't always the best practice and it isn't foolproof it does add the little extra something.

I feel that the philosophy of Arch fits me better, but the way the packages are handled (in my opinion) don't really fit with my idea's of package management. The flexibility and ease of customization of Arch make up for that in my books though, as when I find something I don't like I can also change it to fit my needs. Though again I feel a system with a package management system setup like Pacman should ease a lot of this and actually make you have to do less work to get the result you're looking for.

Anyway, my point (where ever it is) was that eventually I feel Arch's packages should be split up to increase choice. I do understand that this would require a lot more work and that Arch is still young and working on a lot of other things at moment.

That's where I feel like I come in, I would like to help, but I'm only good at thinking up ideas and have limited time at the moment. I should have a lot more soon after I move (im in the middle of moving btw).

Well, that's all I have to say.

Dusty · 2005-01-15 17:23:18

Being on dialup, splitting kde apps has my vote. I usually only use one or two apps from each package, and don't like to have to download all of the others every update.

KDE is a pretty big headache for the maintainers. I don't see them being able to manage this for quite a while yet. But at least the request has been made.

Dusty

tpowa · 2005-01-15 17:45:04

it's pretty impossible to do such a thing.
the first change i'll do is to outsource the arch config's of kde to a separate package that changes in this will not trigger a new kdebase or kdelibs package.
it's a hard thing to break kde into pieces and i will not do it. i reduced some depends. kde is heavy sorry about that.
greetings tpowa

Dusty · 2005-01-15 19:48:26

I was thinking perhaps the apps at kde-apps.org could be packaged separately, so users could have a choice but I see that many of those held in the base packages (I searched for kscd and kmix from kdemultimedia, for example) are not available as separate packages.

The KDE packages were meant to be distributed in the kde* packages, so that is how they should be packaged. The Arch philosophy is generally to package things the way the developers designed them.

It is too bad though. 8)

Dusty

woodstock · 2005-01-15 23:11:12

Hmm, well I haven't had time to play with this stuff yet.

Quick question though... how does Debian do it? I really like how they do it, but I also hate it at the same time. It must be a pain to maintain (hmm kinda has a ring to it)

Dusty, you pretty much got the idea that I was planning on trying. kde-apps.org has most of the *major* apps which seem to be able to be packaged seperately...

Now I'm pretty sure we can keep kdelibs as one large package and see what we can split up from the rest. We can make kdebase and the works meta packages similar to the KDE group package. So when someone does Pacman -S kdebase it grabs all of the kdebase stuff which just happens to be all seperate files which get called apon by this file. I don't know if this is possible, just seems like a cool idea.

Im not sure if that made sense, but like I said I'll give this a go once I have time. I may also just throw up a repo with the PKGBUILDS.

babyigor37 · 2005-01-16 00:07:22

woodstock, I don't know if you have any experience with Gentoo, but recently split ebuilds of all the KDE apps have been added to portage. Personally, I don't have a clue as to how ebulds work (PKGBUILD make so much more sense) but maybe you might be able to look at some of those ebuilds to help get started. As for using the apps on kde-apps.org, it seems to me that those are generally for people using older versions of KDE. The Kopete page, for example, gives instructions on how to install it on KDE 3.2, but is also says:

If you're using KDE 3.3.x already, then you
should NOT download and install this release.

Basically, splitting KDE into individual packages seems like a massive undertaking. I wish you luck and I hope that, one day, I will be able to type "pacman -S kruler" instead of "pacman -S kdegraphics"

woodstock · 2005-01-16 01:56:13

babyigor37: Thanks for the tip. I have actually known about gentoo's recent kde ebuilds and have been looking at them. I'm trying to also find out how Debian does it and see if I can throw up some test PKGBUILDS sometime next week.

This of course I will test even before I let the beta builds go out. I don't like ruining peoples setups, even if they know that its a test and that things may break or already be broken .

I'll keep you Archers posted as I progress.

*Another Idea Below*

I'm coming from a Slackware background and really enjoyed Dropline Gnome, though personally I prefer KDE (personal taste nothing really other than that) and I was thinking of doing the same thing but with KDE, and especially if I can manage to get the files split up. This will make it really simple to customize KDE and making a special breed of it (For Arch of course).

EDIT: Silly spelling corrections, I probably missed some still lol, Im in a rush anyway -- Still have to pack.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-01-14 19:44:39

Splitting up KDE apps

#2 2005-01-14 21:57:02

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#3 2005-01-14 22:15:46

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#4 2005-01-15 17:23:18

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#5 2005-01-15 17:45:04

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#6 2005-01-15 19:48:26

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#7 2005-01-15 23:11:12

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#8 2005-01-16 00:07:22

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

#9 2005-01-16 01:56:13

Re: Splitting up KDE apps

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