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

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 27, 2009 0:54 UTC (Fri) by malor (subscriber, #2973)
In reply to: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News) by JoeF
Parent article: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

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.

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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.