Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News) [LWN.net]

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 18:46 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486)
In reply to: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News) by wstephenson
Parent article: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

The third option, moaning that KDE tells big fat lies in the comments here, may make you feel better, but just amuses the rest of us.

Decoupling means being able to run kopete without installing all the rest of KDE4.
Heck, pidgin can run on KDE3 just fine. Why can't the latest kopete? The answer is: because it is tightly coupled to KDE4.
No amount of arrogant posts changes the fact that at this point, the "decoupling" is indeed a "big fat lie." It is PHB-style marketing BS.
Get your act together and release a stand-alone kopete that runs on KDE3. _Then_ you would have a point.

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Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 19:50 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

That's like asking for the KDE3 version of Kopete to run without KDE3's libraries, e.g. make it run with KDE1's libraries. Well, that's an impossibility.

However you can install just the KDE Dev Platform 4 libraries and runtime (something not easily achieved with KDE3, btw; we made this much easier by purposefully reorganizing parts of our source tree for the 4.x releases). This makes it no different in any way to any other application out there that uses shared libraries.

The libraries are, btw, less than 10% of the code of the overall KDE codebase.

"The answer is: because it is tightly coupled to KDE4."

That is factually incorrect. It only uses the 4.x libraries and is not tightly coupled to any other part of KDE's software outside of that. It isn't tightly coupled to other KDE appications and has no coupling at all to any KDE workspace (or non-KDE workspace, for that matter).

"Get your act together and release a stand-alone kopete that runs on KDE3."

The version of Kopete that comes with the 4.x series does run in the KDE3 workspace and aside other KDE3 apps just fine as long as you have the 4.x libs (and that's all!) installed; we also released a KDE3 version of Kopete, though that is no longer developed further. You are free to do so.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 21:56 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]

The version of Kopete that comes with the 4.x series does run in the KDE3 workspace and aside other KDE3 apps just fine as long as you have the 4.x libs (and that's all!) installed

So, you essentially confirm that there is no decoupling at this point.

we also released a KDE3 version of Kopete, though that is no longer developed further. You are free to do so.

I've found the patches to get the Yahoo login working for kopete 0.12.7, and I am using that now, thank you very much.

But again, the whole issue is not about any particular program per se. The issue is that your announcement of decoupling is nothing more than basically meaningless marketing hogwash at this point.
I hope you add some meat, i.e., actually _do_ the decoupling you talk about.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 26, 2009 22:28 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

"So, you essentially confirm that there is no decoupling at this point."

No; you're evidently asking for Kopete not to use any libraries. That's not how software works.

What we're saying is that there is a development platform, workspaces and applications. The applications and workspaces use the dev platform, but applications and workspaces do not rely on each other.

As I explained above (the comment containing the example using Zypper) you can quite easily see this in action.

"I've found the patches to get the Yahoo login working for kopete 0.12.7, and I am using that now, thank you very much."

Great! :)

"The issue is that your announcement of decoupling is nothing more than basically meaningless marketing hogwash at this point."

The announcement is completely accurate. The decoupling talked about in the announcement is not at all what you are looking for (applications 'magically' using libraries they haven't been written for; in such a world the GIMP could use Qt and MS Office would run on Linux natively). From what we can gather from your previous comments you have some deep misconceptions about how things are put together within KDE's software. To be frank, that is something we do take part of the blame for: we have not been very clear in how we communicate "how things actually get put together" and so people end up with all sorts of odd ideas. This rebranding is one piece in the overall solution for that happening to people in the future.

But to reiterate: apps are not tied to the workspace; they are not tied to each other; they do depend on the development platform (which is the entire point of the dev platform, of course), but that is a relatively thin layer of libraries (relative to the bulk of applications above and software infrastructure below). This is exactly what the announcement tries to make clear, and this is exactly how it's been since at least KDE 3.0 if not even earlier. (IOW, this isn't even a "KDE4" thing)

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 30, 2009 6:30 UTC (Mon) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]

No; you're evidently asking for Kopete not to use any libraries. That's not how software works.
I know very well how software works, I develop software myself.
But, I would not have my users jump through the amount of hoops that you apparently think is ok.
And I don't think I have misconceptions about how KDE works. I understand very well that kopete, for example, relies on certain libraries. But I don't think it relies on most of the libraries that need to be compiled in kdelibs. And it certainly doesn't need all the things in kdenetworks.
And I have a certain understanding of the word "decoupling", based on the English dictionary definition. It seems to me that the KDE people use a different definition.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 27, 2009 0:54 UTC (Fri) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

I have no dog in this race, and while I suspect this 'branding' idea is going to fail for the simple reason that it's too complex, I do want to show the output from Debian Lenny, coming from a server that's not presently running X Windows:

apt-cache show kopete [snip] Source: kdenetwork Version: 4:3.5.10-2 Replaces: konversation (<= 0.14.0-4), sim (<= 0.9.3-2) Depends: kdelibs4c2a (>= 4:3.5.9), libc6 (>= 2.7-1), libgadu3 (>= 1:1.8.0+r592), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0), libgsmme1c2a (>= 1.10), libidn11 (>= 0.5.18), libmeanwhile1 (>= 1.0.2), libqt3-mt (>= 3:3.3.8b), libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1), libx11-6, libxml2 (>= 2.6.27), libxrender1, libxslt1.1 (>= 1.1.18) Recommends: qca-tls Suggests: kdeartwork-emoticons, khelpcenter, imagemagick, gnupg, ekiga

I did an 'aptitude install kopete', just to see what would be installed:

The following NEW packages will be installed: aspell{a} aspell-en{a} dbus{a} dbus-x11{a} dictionaries-common{a} esound-clients{a} esound-common{a} fam{a} hicolor-icon-theme{a} kdelibs-data{a} kdelibs4c2a{a} kopete libakode2{a} libart-2.0-2{a} libarts1-akode{a} libarts1c2a{a} libartsc0{a} libasound2{a} libaspell15{a} libaudiofile0{a} libavahi-client3{a} libavahi-common-data{a} libavahi-common3{a} libavahi-qt3-1{a} libavc1394-0{a} libdbus-1-3{a} libesd0{a} libfam0{a} libfreebob0{a} libgadu3{a} libgsmme1c2a{a} libiec61883-0{a} libilmbase6{a} libjack0{a} libjasper1{a} liblua50{a} liblualib50{a} libmad0{a} libmeanwhile1{a} libopenexr6{a} libraw1394-8{a} libsamplerate0{a} libspeex1{a} libtiff4{a} libvorbis0a{a} libvorbisfile3{a} libxaw7{a} libxpm4{a} libxslt1.1{a} libxtrap6{a} libxxf86misc1{a} menu-xdg{a} oss-compat{a} portmap{a} qca-tls{a} x11-xserver-utils{a}

That's not a completely trivial list, and it'll use 137 megs on disk to run, but that's not even vaguely the whole KDE4 distro. It looks like it's just grabbing the libs, and that whatever distro you're using has done a poorer job of packaging.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 30, 2009 8:11 UTC (Mon) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link]

Thanks for actually making my point.
137MB for an f-ing IM client??? Give me a break.
That's Microsoft-style bloatware.
If kopete really needs 137MB of disk space to run, something is seriously wrong with it.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 30, 2009 9:31 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Two points.

By the looks of it, malor's system doesn't have any existing software using X11 or audio.
aptitude appears to have been configured to install Recommends: items by default.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Dec 1, 2009 5:44 UTC (Tue) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

Did you actually read the list of required dependencies? This is on a fairly minimal server without X Windows, so getting all the dependencies installed requires a great deal more than it would on a server with X already on it.

If you look at the direct depends carefully, most of them are very basic libraries for sound and graphics, as well as a couple for talking on specific IM networks. The only two that are directly KDE-related appear to be kdelibs4c2a and libqt3-mt. kdelibs is about 10 megs, libqt3 is about 3.5, and kopete itself is 8 megs. So it's a total KDE-related footprint of about 21 or 22 megs, which is maybe a little high, but considering you're getting the QT and KDE libraries with it, not at all unreasonable. The rest of the dependencies are really basic things that you'd usually have installed if you were on X Windows, even if you don't have KDE at all.

Ubuntu is quite different; they've put a TON of dependencies on kopete, and even starting from X, you'll end up with an extra 215 megs of stuff. So the clean packaging is quite clearly optional. I presume that they've compiled more features into Ubuntu kopete, but I don't know that for sure.

Basically, it looks to me like the KDE claims of fairly strong differentiation between the desktop environment and basic requirements to run individual pieces of software are quite accurate. If I just 'aptitude install kde', it'll take 1,139 megs.

As a point of comparison, in a quick search, I don't see any GNOME applications that do the multi-network connection. GnomeICU does ICQ only, and takes 111 megs with dependencies.

For context: 'aptitude install gnome' requires 1,587.