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

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 28, 2009 18:56 UTC (Sat) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

The following is Ubuntu's take on digikam. Without the --no-install-recommends, it also pulls in dolphin, khelpcenter and (via kipi-plugins) konqueror, adding another 35Mb when all is said and done. As I said, work might be needed to clean up the dependencies :) I don't think that they have seriously considered using KDE software components without KDE as a whole yet.

$ sudo apt-get install digikam --no-install-recommends
[...]
Suggested packages:
digikam-doc kdebase djvulibre-bin akonadi-server gxine xine-ui libxine1-doc
libxine-doc libxine1-ffmpeg
Recommended packages:
dolphin kipi-plugins khelpcenter4 exiv2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
digikam kde-icons-oxygen kdebase-runtime kdebase-runtime-bin-kde4
kdebase-runtime-data kdebase-runtime-data-common kdelibs-bin kdelibs5
kdelibs5-data kdepimlibs-data kdepimlibs5 libakonadiprivate1
libboost-program-options1.38.0 libclucene0ldbl libexiv2-5 libkdcraw7
libkexiv2-7 libkipi6 libknotificationitem1 liblensfun-data liblensfun0
liblzma0 libmarble4 libplasma3 libsoprano4 libstreamanalyzer0 libstreams0
libxcb-shape0 libxcb-shm0 libxcb-xv0 libxine1 libxine1-bin libxine1-console
libxine1-misc-plugins libxine1-x marble-data phonon-backend-xine
soprano-daemon
0 upgraded, 38 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 62.1MB of archives.
After this operation, 196MB of additional disk space will be used.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 29, 2009 8:42 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

yes, there are certainly a few things there which aren't needed. And there
is a lot there which isn't part of the KDE platform but part of the lower
stack. Xine, soprano, libexiv, boost and Akonadi come to mind.

But anyway - I don't see why any of this makes digikam any less standing on
its own? Ok, installing dolphin or any other graphical application is silly,
but that's recommended, not required. The libs makes sense - and you only
have to install them once. It's not like the diskspace is gonna hurt
anyone... Digikam uses marble for geolocation, soprano for tagging and
rating, might use akonadi soon for storing the actual images. And each has
his own dependencies too... With functionality come dependencies. Or a huge,
unmaintainable codebase because you have a strong NIH attitude (eg Firefox,
OpenOffice)

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 29, 2009 9:49 UTC (Sun) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> But anyway - I don't see why any of this makes digikam any less standing on its own?

My question is more whether the Ubuntu package of Digikam (subtle difference there!) stands on its own. And the discussion of reducing the total dependency size (and that didn't include Qt either, which I have installed for VirtualBox) comes from the original idea that Digikam might be a good alternative to F-Spot, with its Mono dependency (both large in megabytes and charged politically) in the default Ubuntu install. In this context it does make sense to keep the size in megabytes of the Digikam dependencies as small as they can reasonably be.

It is not definitely not NIH - although to tell the truth, I don't think that it is NIH in the cases of Firefox and Oo.o either; they just both arrived from the proprietary world, where you don't have the luxury of FOSS-style dependencies.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 29, 2009 10:13 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

Well, the dependencies are big if you don't run anything yet. The KDE
Platform IS big, offers a lot of features. Digikam does. I guess that is
indeed a disadvantage, having a 3.5 mb download would be better. But it's
not a huge issue, right?

I can see why somebody wouldn't want to use F-spot - mono being evil (or
not) and all. And having the slowness due to an interpreted language etc (or
not, again, it's up for debate). Of course I'd rather see ppl who want to
use Digikam and other KDE apps because they're good ;-)

I just hope the dependencies aren't a real reason not to use digikam or
other KDE apps. I think for normal users they're not, as the won't even see
the libs being downloaded. As long as it is reasonably properly packaged (eg
doesn't include dolphin) things should be OK.

Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 29, 2009 21:32 UTC (Sun) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> Of course I'd rather see ppl who want to use Digikam and other KDE apps because they're good ;-)
See http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22708/ for my attempt at getting something moving here. Feel free to promote it a bit and pass the link around to like-minded people if you like it (or tell me why not if you don't :). I think it would be great if good applications were not held back by being associated with the "other desktop", and I think this would be a good chance to break down some of the walls in people's minds.