Onsdag den 24. marts 2010 22:40:18 skrev Andrew Wafaa:

So basically I'm looking to see what you the KDE Community feel is missing, an issue, could be improved etc. Also crucially how do you think any of the issues can be resolved.

I'm not sure exactly what kind of answers you're looking for. But here are some stray thoughts of mine about the state of the geeko nation. The main thing we're missing is a clear goal and direction. Wanting to be "the best community distro available" is too vague and can mean a ton of different things to different people. As a comparison I think Ubuntu and Fedora have goals and identities that are operational and that it's pretty clear to most people what they are and what they want to do. In terms of infrastructure, I think we're more likely to have too much of it than missing anything. Though I sometimes miss a good and easy way to get an overview of who maintains (or doesn't maintain) what packages, what jobs currently need to be done, and good handling of package requests. In terms of software I think the main things holding the distro back are: * broken ATi repo (guess we're defenseless here) * updater applet (used by ~99% of users almost daily for important tasks, but is sooo not working smooth, and obviously not a priority) * yast and zypper hiding vendor change update availability from non-experts Other than that I think we're in good shape. Just need to keep working and continually do decent releases, and we should return to former strength and more - if we can avoid more PR disasters and disastrous releases (10.1/ZMD, 11.0/KDE4.0, 11.1/11-months-of-death-by-a-thousand-bugs). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Andrew Wafaa wrote:

So basically I'm looking to see what you the KDE Community feel is missing, an issue, could be improved etc.  Also crucially how do you think any of the issues can be resolved.

Overall I am very happy with KDE on opensuse. There are some issues, though, but none that I would consider critical. First, the layout of the repositories. The most basic thing is I think we need separate KDE3 and KDE4 backports repositories. Currently the backports repository is a mix of KDE 3 and KDE 4 software, and without hunting through the dependencies it is impossible to tell what is KDE 3 software and what is KDE 4 software. For people wanting to keep a clean KDE 4 system this a hassle, especially when there are KDE 4 alternatives available. I also think that the naming of the "playground" repository is misleading. KDE's playground has a specific meaning, which is not the same a the opensuse KDE playground repository. I think if we are using the same names as KDE, it should do the same thing, and if it does something different it should have a different name. Something like "experimental", "testing", or "unstable extras" would be better in my opinion. Speaking of KDE repositories, in my opinion, opensuse could do a better job packaging software from KDE's own extragear repository. For instance the google akonadi resource was released as stable just a week after 4.3 was released, but was not actually packaged by openSUSE until after 4.4 was released over 6 months later. On the other hand things from kde-apps.org and kde-look.org get packaged almost immediately. Kchess, for example, was released on kde-apps.org 2 days ago and is already available from opensuse. There are similar issues with playground. For instance openSUSE still does not have the mplayer or vlc phonon backends, despite the fact that they are packaged by other distributions and are supposed to be a in a pretty usable state and hosted by KDE, while marave, hosted by google and much newer, is available. Other, probably less stable playground software and third-party software is packaged as well. There is also an issue with missing or broken dependencies. For instance the main cantor backend, sage, is not available from openSUSE, making cantor pretty useless. Neither is R, another backend. Further, the only backend available (besides the built-in kalgebra one) is maxima, and you have to add another repository to use it. I'm not sure the best solution for that, but it is an issue. Ideally packages required or suggested by KDE software and that opensuse is legally allowed to distribute would be available in the main opensuse oss repository and/or the kde desktop/backports repository, but that may or may not be feasible. Similarly, changes to how phonon works with pulseaudio for KDE SC 4.4 meant pulseaudio support was broken for opensuse in KDE SC 4.4. Fixes are available, but have not yet been packaged for opensuse even though it has been a couple of months since 4.4 was released (this was discussed recently on this mailing list). I think it was either xapian or recoll that could not be installed at all due to missing dependencies until recently. The last case may be a problem with buildservice allowing packages whose dependencies are not available to still be released, it should probably at least put out warnings if that happens. Also, eric does not seem to run at all, at least for me and many others, and hasn't since at least september, although a working version is available from the developer's own buildservice repository (although it conflicts with some of opensuse's own packages). With the release of the netbook reference version, I think that the release should be mirrored in the KDE repositories so openSUSE users can easily install it as their main system. Other future reference implementations would also be made available (or put in a single repository with meta packages that would pick out just the bits from a given reference implantation). This would also solve the request of having vanilla KDE packages available. The argument to this point was that it was infeasible, but if you are working with KDE to provide vanilla KDE packages that install on opensuse then I don't think it would be much extra work to just put those same packages in the repository (although I could be wrong). I think that the KDE release one-click-installs (currently named KDE4-BASIS, KDE4-DEFAULT, KDE4-DEVEL, and KDE4-GAMES) should be renamed to match the new KDE branding. Namely, there should be a kde-platform ymp for just the libraries (so people can use KDE in a non-KDE DE), a kde-workspaces ymp that includes the desktop environment but no other software, a kde-sc-base and kde-sc-default corresponding to to the current kde4-basis and kde4-default, respectively, and then kde-devel. I don't think there is any need to have kde4 in the names anymore. Currently the packages like kdeedu, kdeadmin, and kdegames do not do much beyond just installing the libkdeedu and libkdegames packages, which is fairly redundant. I think it would be better if these installed the software that is part of the respective KDE svn repositories. So, for example, installing kdeedu would install all of packages built from software in the kdeedu svn repository. This would also simplify the kde4-games ymp, it would just need to depend on the kdegames package and any other games not packaged with a KDE sc, instead of all the games individually. I understand that it is a lot of work to keep the KDE repositories going, and I don't know which if any of these are actually feasible in practice, but they are problems I have noticed that I think would be good to address if possible. As for non-packing issues: I think we need a fix for the kdm configuration issue. There is already a kdm configuration tool, I think we should be allowed to use it (I'm not implying we are purposefully blocked from using, just that it cannot be used currently). If you open the "network settings" module in KDE's system settings, it tells you that opensuse is not supported, then lists all the supported platforms (suse linux 9.1 is the most recent suse version supported). I think having support for opensuse in the KDE network settings module is important. I might be missing a package that provides support, but if there is such a package it should probably be a dependency. There may be a good reason for this, but a common complaint is that sub-pixel rendering for fonts is not turned on by default in opensuse in KDE, unlike in most distributions, resulting in ugly fonts. I agree with the updater applet needs to be fixed. Having to open yast just to install updated packages does not seem like a good approach to me considering how often updated packages are made available. What Martin said about the ATI repo also holds true for the nvidia repo. It has been a week and a half since the release of the newest stable nvidia driver, 195.36.15, yet it it still not available from opensuse's repository. There are also no unstable nvidia drivers at all, which would normally not an issue but for the nvidia drivers that are frankly not that good to begin with having unstable drivers available is often necessary for people to get reasonable performance and support for newer hardware on their systems. This shouldn't be too big a hassle, unstable drivers are released weeks if not months apart and stable drivers are released months apart. I may have more later, but this is what I can think of right now. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

Am Donnerstag, 25. März 2010 17:45:56 schrieb todd rme:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Andrew Wafaa wrote:

...

So basically I'm looking to see what you the KDE Community feel is missing, an issue, could be improved etc. Also crucially how do you think any of the issues can be resolved.

Overall I am very happy with KDE on opensuse. There are some issues, though, but none that I would consider critical.

First, the layout of the repositories. The most basic thing is I think we need separate KDE3 and KDE4 backports repositories. Currently the backports repository is a mix of KDE 3 and KDE 4 software, and without hunting through the dependencies it is impossible to tell what is KDE 3 software and what is KDE 4 software. For people wanting to keep a clean KDE 4 system this a hassle, especially when there are KDE 4 alternatives available.

I also think that the naming of the "playground" repository is misleading. KDE's playground has a specific meaning, which is not the same a the opensuse KDE playground repository. I think if we are using the same names as KDE, it should do the same thing, and if it does something different it should have a different name. Something like "experimental", "testing", or "unstable extras" would be better in my opinion.

Gah not the repositories again, there has been a lot of discussion about this already and this deemed the most proper way based on opensuse(!) development. Most people now live with it, so changing it would be breaking alot of setups again, let's just live with it, the repository structure is explained pretty good on the wiki page even with the mixup of opensuse / kde terms.

Speaking of KDE repositories, in my opinion, opensuse could do a better job packaging software from KDE's own extragear repository. For instance the google akonadi resource was released as stable just a week after 4.3 was released, but was not actually packaged by openSUSE until after 4.4 was released over 6 months later. On the other hand things from kde-apps.org and kde-look.org get packaged almost immediately. Kchess, for example, was released on kde-apps.org 2 days ago and is already available from opensuse.

There are similar issues with playground. For instance openSUSE still does not have the mplayer or vlc phonon backends, despite the fact that they are packaged by other distributions and are supposed to be a in a pretty usable state and hosted by KDE, while marave, hosted by google and much newer, is available. Other, probably less stable playground software and third-party software is packaged as well.

mplayer and vlc is a no go on novell hosted repositories

There is also an issue with missing or broken dependencies. For instance the main cantor backend, sage, is not available from openSUSE, making cantor pretty useless. Neither is R, another backend. Further, the only backend available (besides the built-in kalgebra one) is maxima, and you have to add another repository to use it. I'm not sure the best solution for that, but it is an issue. Ideally packages required or suggested by KDE software and that opensuse is legally allowed to distribute would be available in the main opensuse oss repository and/or the kde desktop/backports repository, but that may or may not be feasible.

Similarly, changes to how phonon works with pulseaudio for KDE SC 4.4 meant pulseaudio support was broken for opensuse in KDE SC 4.4. Fixes are available, but have not yet been packaged for opensuse even though it has been a couple of months since 4.4 was released (this was discussed recently on this mailing list). I think it was either xapian or recoll that could not be installed at all due to missing dependencies until recently. The last case may be a problem with buildservice allowing packages whose dependencies are not available to still be released, it should probably at least put out warnings if that happens. Also, eric does not seem to run at all, at least for me and many others, and hasn't since at least september, although a working version is available from the developer's own buildservice repository (although it conflicts with some of opensuse's own packages).

Throwing all this in a single big mail with also other points doesn't help tracking down faulty or missing packaging, either do single mails or bugreports towards the proper repositories. I know we have a lot of eager people packaging basicly everything they can get their hands on (I remember especially tittiacoke), but they can't track every kde related place on the web for useful stuff.

With the release of the netbook reference version, I think that the release should be mirrored in the KDE repositories so openSUSE users can easily install it as their main system. Other future reference implementations would also be made available (or put in a single repository with meta packages that would pick out just the bits from a given reference implantation). This would also solve the request of having vanilla KDE packages available. The argument to this point was that it was infeasible, but if you are working with KDE to provide vanilla KDE packages that install on opensuse then I don't think it would be much extra work to just put those same packages in the repository (although I could be wrong).

I think using it for an opensuse-kde-netbook spin is already beeing considered, depends on what is useful and what not. But I don't think having like 10 opensuse related official spins is a good thing, better promote "community spins" The netbook reference uses the UNSTABLE repository, or whatever version they currently target so their is no new kde clone on the obs.

I think that the KDE release one-click-installs (currently named KDE4-BASIS, KDE4-DEFAULT, KDE4-DEVEL, and KDE4-GAMES) should be renamed to match the new KDE branding. Namely, there should be a kde-platform ymp for just the libraries (so people can use KDE in a non-KDE DE), a kde-workspaces ymp that includes the desktop environment but no other software, a kde-sc-base and kde-sc-default corresponding to to the current kde4-basis and kde4-default, respectively, and then kde-devel. I don't think there is any need to have kde4 in the names anymore.

add it to the kde ideas page for 11.3 http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Ideas/11.3

Currently the packages like kdeedu, kdeadmin, and kdegames do not do much beyond just installing the libkdeedu and libkdegames packages, which is fairly redundant. I think it would be better if these installed the software that is part of the respective KDE svn repositories. So, for example, installing kdeedu would install all of packages built from software in the kdeedu svn repository. This would also simplify the kde4-games ymp, it would just need to depend on the kdegames package and any other games not packaged with a KDE sc, instead of all the games individually.

there are patterns for that, they are the proper way to go for package bundles

I understand that it is a lot of work to keep the KDE repositories going, and I don't know which if any of these are actually feasible in practice, but they are problems I have noticed that I think would be good to address if possible.

As for non-packing issues:

I think we need a fix for the kdm configuration issue. There is already a kdm configuration tool, I think we should be allowed to use it (I'm not implying we are purposefully blocked from using, just that it cannot be used currently).

+1 on that, the yast / kdm competition about proper autologin etc are still somewhat confusing

If you open the "network settings" module in KDE's system settings, it tells you that opensuse is not supported, then lists all the supported platforms (suse linux 9.1 is the most recent suse version supported). I think having support for opensuse in the KDE network settings module is important. I might be missing a package that provides support, but if there is such a package it should probably be a dependency.

huh? For me it's the config stuff for networkmanager

There may be a good reason for this, but a common complaint is that sub-pixel rendering for fonts is not turned on by default in opensuse in KDE, unlike in most distributions, resulting in ugly fonts.

I think that's a legal thing again as these use patented concepts.

I agree with the updater applet needs to be fixed. Having to open yast just to install updated packages does not seem like a good approach to me considering how often updated packages are made available.

What Martin said about the ATI repo also holds true for the nvidia repo. It has been a week and a half since the release of the newest stable nvidia driver, 195.36.15, yet it it still not available from opensuse's repository. There are also no unstable nvidia drivers at all, which would normally not an issue but for the nvidia drivers that are frankly not that good to begin with having unstable drivers available is often necessary for people to get reasonable performance and support for newer hardware on their systems. This shouldn't be too big a hassle, unstable drivers are released weeks if not months apart and stable drivers are released months apart.

Not opensuses call, nudge nvidia / ati to get their act together on the repos, they could easily set up an obs linking to opensuse to get their updates out timely.

I may have more later, but this is what I can think of right now.

Please don't write such big emails next time, they are hard to parse especially if one wants to tackle a specific point, you can't proper thread afterwards on single issues etc =) Karsten -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On 25/03/10 16:45, todd rme wrote:

First, the layout of the repositories. The most basic thing is I think we need separate KDE3 and KDE4 backports repositories. Currently the backports repository is a mix of KDE 3 and KDE 4 software, and without hunting through the dependencies it is impossible to tell what is KDE 3 software and what is KDE 4 software. For people wanting to keep a clean KDE 4 system this a hassle, especially when there are KDE 4 alternatives available.

Agree on further removal/isolation of KDE3 packages from projects. If nothing else it makes it more obvious where a KDE4 alternative is missing.

I also think that the naming of the "playground" repository is misleading. KDE's playground has a specific meaning, which is not the same a the opensuse KDE playground repository. I think if we are using the same names as KDE, it should do the same thing, and if it does something different it should have a different name. Something like "experimental", "testing", or "unstable extras" would be better in my opinion.

What I would really like to see is clarified guidelines on what goes into Playground (or its renamed equivalent) vs Community/Backports (is is alpha? beta? "stable"?). Another big question I have is that what do you do when a package in Playground goes stable? How do you communicate to the users that the upgrade path is to change repositories? IMO what we have is a conflict between developer/packager requirements and user requirements. The developer/packager would like many projects, each containing only a few tightly related software so that maintenance is easy, lots of chances for branching, and there are not too many people trying to work on the same thing at once. The user wants as much software to be available from one repository as possible so there is less chance of adding conflicting repos, easier updates, etc. How do we reconcile these two conflicting requirements? Do we separate the idea of the repository and the build service project (i.e. multiple projects feeding into one repository), or do we create a new object that it is a set of related guaranteed-non-conflicting repositories and ask users to add/remove those instead? Or something else? This has been pretty much discussed before, especially in the context of the KDE repo layout, and the current situation just about works, so I for one don't want to disturb it.

Speaking of KDE repositories, in my opinion, opensuse could do a better job packaging software from KDE's own extragear repository. For instance the google akonadi resource was released as stable just a week after 4.3 was released, but was not actually packaged by openSUSE until after 4.4 was released over 6 months later. On the other hand things from kde-apps.org and kde-look.org get packaged almost immediately. Kchess, for example, was released on kde-apps.org 2 days ago and is already available from opensuse.

There are similar issues with playground. For instance openSUSE still does not have the mplayer or vlc phonon backends, despite the fact that they are packaged by other distributions and are supposed to be a in a pretty usable state and hosted by KDE, while marave, hosted by google and much newer, is available. Other, probably less stable playground software and third-party software is packaged as well.

This is indicative of the lack of a single to-be-packaged list for packagers. There is a horribly out-of-date and long list of packages on the wiki (http://en.opensuse.org/Package_Wishlist) that noone reads (and has a big notice not to use). There is openFATE, which is nice but is lacking in screening (both in tools and people to do it) and organization features (how can I get a list of all features that are requests for KDE-related packages?). There is also a strong sense that stuff from kde.org is the "KDE Team" responsibility and that stuff from kde-apps and kde-look is "community" responsibility. Maybe it should be that way, maybe it shouldn't, maybe its unintentional, but that's definitely the way the work is split right now. This is the reason for a lot of the discrepancies you see. There has long been talk of an automated dashboard that watches kde releases and kde-apps and has an overview of what packages need updating, but it doesn't exist yet. I don't remember whose pet project this was ... As a result of this situation packagers just package what they need, so for example I wanted to try out marave so I packaged it. As for vlc/mplayer that's a legal no-no on Novell servers. Eventually people just end up asking on the packman list and that's even worse, because then you end up compiled against only stable/old KDE, and you get silly incompatibility crashes :P An organized direction to packager efforts would cause the biggest improvement to the openSUSE KDE experience out of everything I can think of.

There is also an issue with missing or broken dependencies. For instance the main cantor backend, sage, is not available from openSUSE, making cantor pretty useless. Neither is R, another backend. Further, the only backend available (besides the built-in kalgebra one) is maxima, and you have to add another repository to use it. I'm not sure the best solution for that, but it is an issue. Ideally packages required or suggested by KDE software and that opensuse is legally allowed to distribute would be available in the main opensuse oss repository and/or the kde desktop/backports repository, but that may or may not be feasible.

This is a problem (not that I have a solution) with the way the opensuse repositories and teams are organized. Normally things like sage and R would fall under the purview of, for example, the Education or Science/Math guys. But suddenly the KDE team needs them packaged. So there is duplication of effort and confusion all round, with 20 different versions of the same package all in different repositories, packaged by different folk. Or it just ends up being missed out. Or users have to add 30 different repositories to get everything they need. None of these is ideal. This is a bigger problem than KDE, the duplication of effort on the OBS is huge. I wonder whether there should be a notice like "I see you are trying to build amarok. There are already 122 other home projects that build amarok. Please check if one of them already provides what you need". And the number of packages that are simply links (not even aggregates) of packages with no source changes at all ... but maybe this is all just a side effect of a healthy number of users.

With the release of the netbook reference version, I think that the release should be mirrored in the KDE repositories so openSUSE users can easily install it as their main system. Other future reference implementations would also be made available (or put in a single repository with meta packages that would pick out just the bits from a given reference implantation). This would also solve the request of having vanilla KDE packages available. The argument to this point was that it was infeasible, but if you are working with KDE to provide vanilla KDE packages that install on opensuse then I don't think it would be much extra work to just put those same packages in the repository (although I could be wrong).

Available from day 1: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=KDE:Netbook And vanilla KDE packages are sort-of available, the -branding-upstream packages remove all of the SUSE artwork and some of the customisations. If you want more vanilla than that, well I don't know, why are you using distribution packages then?

I think that the KDE release one-click-installs (currently named KDE4-BASIS, KDE4-DEFAULT, KDE4-DEVEL, and KDE4-GAMES) should be renamed to match the new KDE branding. Namely, there should be a kde-platform ymp for just the libraries (so people can use KDE in a non-KDE DE), a kde-workspaces ymp that includes the desktop environment but no other software, a kde-sc-base and kde-sc-default corresponding to to the current kde4-basis and kde4-default, respectively, and then kde-devel. I don't think there is any need to have kde4 in the names anymore.

Currently the packages like kdeedu, kdeadmin, and kdegames do not do much beyond just installing the libkdeedu and libkdegames packages, which is fairly redundant. I think it would be better if these installed the software that is part of the respective KDE svn repositories. So, for example, installing kdeedu would install all of packages built from software in the kdeedu svn repository. This would also simplify the kde4-games ymp, it would just need to depend on the kdegames package and any other games not packaged with a KDE sc, instead of all the games individually.

There is confusion (at least in my mind) over what should be in 1) ymp one-click installs 2) patterns 3) meta/virtual packages Some guidelines and consistency across openSUSE teams on these would make life easier :)

As for non-packing issues:

I think we need a fix for the kdm configuration issue. There is already a kdm configuration tool, I think we should be allowed to use it (I'm not implying we are purposefully blocked from using, just that it cannot be used currently).

Yes, YaST /etc/sysconfig editor is not quite as intuitive, but the /etc/sysconfig way of configuring thing is well entrenched in SUSE. The only solutions are to hack the KDM configuration module to modify sysconfig (major change from upstream) or disable it (as is done now).

If you open the "network settings" module in KDE's system settings, it tells you that opensuse is not supported, then lists all the supported platforms (suse linux 9.1 is the most recent suse version supported). I think having support for opensuse in the KDE network settings module is important. I might be missing a package that provides support, but if there is such a package it should probably be a dependency.

Umm ... that works for me with NetworkManager-kde4, but maybe you are talking about traditional ifup/down setups. YaST handles those perfectly well so I think KDE has been told not to interfere/blacklist openSUSE. The issue beneath this in my opinion is whether KDE upstream wants to include system administration tools (printers, network, firewall, users, etc.) in System Settings or not. Obviously, it's better for SUSE if they don't, as we have YaST.

There may be a good reason for this, but a common complaint is that sub-pixel rendering for fonts is not turned on by default in opensuse in KDE, unlike in most distributions, resulting in ugly fonts.

Legal reasons (possible patent conflict with Microsoft's ClearType AFAIK), have a look at http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting. Works great for me. Regards, Tejas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

Am Donnerstag, 25. März 2010 23:11:04 schrieb todd rme:

2010/3/25 Karsten König :

...

...

Speaking of KDE repositories, in my opinion, opensuse could do a better job packaging software from KDE's own extragear repository. For instance the google akonadi resource was released as stable just a week after 4.3 was released, but was not actually packaged by openSUSE until after 4.4 was released over 6 months later. On the other hand things from kde-apps.org and kde-look.org get packaged almost immediately. Kchess, for example, was released on kde-apps.org 2 days ago and is already available from opensuse.

There are similar issues with playground. For instance openSUSE still does not have the mplayer or vlc phonon backends, despite the fact that they are packaged by other distributions and are supposed to be a in a pretty usable state and hosted by KDE, while marave, hosted by google and much newer, is available. Other, probably less stable playground software and third-party software is packaged as well.

mplayer and vlc is a no go on novell hosted repositories

This wouldn't require hosting player or vlc themselves, just provide the phonon backends that can make use of the programs if they are available. The official kde repositories already hosts kmplayer and mplayerthumbs, this would be no different.

ok, I didn't knew they don't require mplayer/vlc to build, then please just fire off a request

...

...

There is also an issue with missing or broken dependencies. For instance the main cantor backend, sage, is not available from openSUSE, making cantor pretty useless. Neither is R, another backend. Further, the only backend available (besides the built-in kalgebra one) is maxima, and you have to add another repository to use it. I'm not sure the best solution for that, but it is an issue. Ideally packages required or suggested by KDE software and that opensuse is legally allowed to distribute would be available in the main opensuse oss repository and/or the kde desktop/backports repository, but that may or may not be feasible.

Similarly, changes to how phonon works with pulseaudio for KDE SC 4.4 meant pulseaudio support was broken for opensuse in KDE SC 4.4. Fixes are available, but have not yet been packaged for opensuse even though it has been a couple of months since 4.4 was released (this was discussed recently on this mailing list). I think it was either xapian or recoll that could not be installed at all due to missing dependencies until recently. The last case may be a problem with buildservice allowing packages whose dependencies are not available to still be released, it should probably at least put out warnings if that happens. Also, eric does not seem to run at all, at least for me and many others, and hasn't since at least september, although a working version is available from the developer's own buildservice repository (although it conflicts with some of opensuse's own packages).

Throwing all this in a single big mail with also other points doesn't help tracking down faulty or missing packaging, either do single mails or bugreports towards the proper repositories.

They are examples of the sort of problems I am seeing.

I don't want to downwash the effort you put into this mail, it's just hard to work with.

...

I know we have a lot of eager people packaging basicly everything they can get their hands on (I remember especially tittiacoke), but they can't track every kde related place on the web for useful stuff.

"every kde related place on the web"? I am talking about the official KDE svn repository. I am simply saying there should be at least as much attention given to the offical KDE svn repository as given to kde-look.org and google code. Of course they can't keep track of every random website, but I do think software provided by the official KDE svn repository should be made available.

Have you checked the kde repository? The place is a junkyard you can barely follow for single new applications, kde-apps.org has a feed with updates that matter to a packager, you can't do that on kde svn. I don't know what's the proper way new additions to the svn get announced, but the most time I know something new is in kde svn is when someones post runs by on the planet.

...

...

With the release of the netbook reference version, I think that the release should be mirrored in the KDE repositories so openSUSE users can easily install it as their main system. Other future reference implementations would also be made available (or put in a single repository with meta packages that would pick out just the bits from a given reference implantation). This would also solve the request of having vanilla KDE packages available. The argument to this point was that it was infeasible, but if you are working with KDE to provide vanilla KDE packages that install on opensuse then I don't think it would be much extra work to just put those same packages in the repository (although I could be wrong).

I think using it for an opensuse-kde-netbook spin is already beeing considered, depends on what is useful and what not. But I don't think having like 10 opensuse related official spins is a good thing, better promote "community spins" The netbook reference uses the UNSTABLE repository, or whatever version they currently target so their is no new kde clone on the obs.

It looks like this is actually already done, but it only has i686 versions available, no x86_64 installation is available.

...

...

I think that the KDE release one-click-installs (currently named KDE4-BASIS, KDE4-DEFAULT, KDE4-DEVEL, and KDE4-GAMES) should be renamed to match the new KDE branding. Namely, there should be a kde-platform ymp for just the libraries (so people can use KDE in a non-KDE DE), a kde-workspaces ymp that includes the desktop environment but no other software, a kde-sc-base and kde-sc-default corresponding to to the current kde4-basis and kde4-default, respectively, and then kde-devel. I don't think there is any need to have kde4 in the names anymore.

add it to the kde ideas page for 11.3 http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Ideas/11.3

Okay.

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Currently the packages like kdeedu, kdeadmin, and kdegames do not do much beyond just installing the libkdeedu and libkdegames packages, which is fairly redundant. I think it would be better if these installed the software that is part of the respective KDE svn repositories. So, for example, installing kdeedu would install all of packages built from software in the kdeedu svn repository. This would also simplify the kde4-games ymp, it would just need to depend on the kdegames package and any other games not packaged with a KDE sc, instead of all the games individually.

there are patterns for that, they are the proper way to go for package bundles

Then we should probably get rid of those packages, since they don't do anything useful.

They are basicly the same as the kdelibs package, kdelibs itself doesn't do anything useful either (I think, maybe there are some applications but let's not go down to hair splitting) They contain the library every game / admin / edu package requires so if I only want khangman I get khangman and kdegames You could name it libkdegames or so, but it's like the repo names, changing requires annoying work =)

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If you open the "network settings" module in KDE's system settings, it tells you that opensuse is not supported, then lists all the supported platforms (suse linux 9.1 is the most recent suse version supported). I think having support for opensuse in the KDE network settings module is important. I might be missing a package that provides support, but if there is such a package it should probably be a dependency.

huh? For me it's the config stuff for networkmanager

I always get this error when I open it, unless I tell it not to show the error anymore (but then parts don't work properly).

I am on 4.4.1 already, that might be a reason, do you use NM at all?

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There may be a good reason for this, but a common complaint is that sub-pixel rendering for fonts is not turned on by default in opensuse in KDE, unlike in most distributions, resulting in ugly fonts.

I think that's a legal thing again as these use patented concepts.

So it is legal to include it in the software, but not to enable it?

I think opensuses font libraries don't even support it, so enabling shouldn't change anything. But I don't track all the legal issues, novell barely documents what's blocked by legal department =/ Even if they'd release a fontlib with enabled subpixel hinting the kde devel group wouldn't notice right away, inter group communication still looks somewhat flaky from the outside =)

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What Martin said about the ATI repo also holds true for the nvidia repo. It has been a week and a half since the release of the newest stable nvidia driver, 195.36.15, yet it it still not available from opensuse's repository. There are also no unstable nvidia drivers at all, which would normally not an issue but for the nvidia drivers that are frankly not that good to begin with having unstable drivers available is often necessary for people to get reasonable performance and support for newer hardware on their systems. This shouldn't be too big a hassle, unstable drivers are released weeks if not months apart and stable drivers are released months apart.

Not opensuses call, nudge nvidia / ati to get their act together on the repos, they could easily set up an obs linking to opensuse to get their updates out timely.

Yes, it is opensuse's call. I am not sure about the ATI repository but the nvidia repository it is only hosted by nvidia, all of the packing is done by opensuse, nvidia has no part in making or maintaing the packages.

Oh? I didn't knew that, I only know there are build specs available which should help nvidia/ati build their drivers for the respective kernel version.

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I may have more later, but this is what I can think of right now.

Please don't write such big emails next time, they are hard to parse especially if one wants to tackle a specific point, you can't proper thread afterwards on single issues etc =)

So I am supposed to post a lot of individual emails? I am not be snarky, I am trying to understand what the best approach to take is.

Yes, it eases the workflow, your mail touched alot of maintainers workplaces right now so everyone would need to open up his own awnser thread for proper handling now anyway =)

-Todd

Karsten -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

Torsdag den 25. marts 2010 23:33:07 skrev Andrew Wafaa:

On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 09:03 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:

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The main thing we're missing is a clear goal and direction. Wanting to be "the best community distro available" is too vague and can mean a ton of different things to different people. As a comparison I think Ubuntu and Fedora have goals and identities that are operational and that it's pretty clear to most people what they are and what they want to do.

So what you're saying is we need both long-term *and* short term goals that are realistic and achievable? That makes perfect sense, and I whole heartily agree. As long as we don't fix the direction or targets too much in stone then it shouldn't be a problem to achieve; I think one thing we as a community need to do better is be more agile. Any chance of examples from Ubuntu & Fedora just so that I (and maybe others) can see what you mean, please?

I mean we need one main, long term goal and purpose, that can be summed up in a single sentence - which is operational enough to guide technical priorities and decision making, as well as focus marketing. Ubuntu have their bug #1 - breaking MS dominance. Wanting to be the "Linux for hobbits". Fedora is all about bleeding edge and free software. What is openSUSE about? Some say it's bleeding edge for geeks and testbed for SLE... some say it's quite stable and user friendly... some say it's for experts... some say it's professional and polished. But it can't be all those things at the same time, and the result is we have people pulling in different directions cuz there's no real agreement on what openSUSE should and shouldn't be. Personally I'd like to see openSUSE as "the professional and productive GNU/Linux for home users" - I think we're in a good position to do that, but there are definitely forces pulling in different directions.

...

In terms of infrastructure, I think we're more likely to have too much of it than missing anything. Though I sometimes miss a good and easy way to get an overview of who maintains (or doesn't maintain) what packages, what jobs currently need to be done, and good handling of package requests.

Are you saying we have too many tools? Or is it the fact the tools are disparate and don't "blend"? In my opinion I'm not so sure we have too many, but that we don't really know how to use what we have - I'm guilty of that lack of knowledge.

I'm not sure e.g. why we need lizards in addition to planetsuse, or how much value users.o.o/connect ads, also how many different version control systems hold openSUSE related stuff now, berlios, gitorious, forgesvn, others? I think our infrastructure could be leaner - making things easier for new contributors and for the admins.

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* updater applet (used by ~99% of users almost daily for important tasks, but is sooo not working smooth, and obviously not a priority)

If it is deemed of high enough importance by the community, then we have to get the priority raised so that we can get things fixed.

The thing is the community won't deem it important. Cuz any active community member knows enough to use zypper or yast to install some patches. But if openSUSE is supposed to be succesful beyond a few geeks and enthusiasts, the updater applet is very important. I can hardly go to a lug meeting or a forum without people complaining about it to me - and I can't blame them I must say.

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* yast and zypper hiding vendor change update availability from non-experts

I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that an explanation to this issue had been made.

Explanations only help the handful of geeks and enthusiasts that listen - and it doesn't change the fact that too much work and knowledge is required to perform vendor change updates for single packages. I haven't checked the state in factory/11.3 yet though - maybe it has been improved sufficiently already. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On 03/26/2010 08:59 AM, Martin Schlander wrote:

Torsdag den 25. marts 2010 23:33:07 skrev Andrew Wafaa:

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On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 09:03 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:

I'm not sure e.g. why we need lizards in addition to planetsuse, or how much value users.o.o/connect ads, also how many different version control systems hold openSUSE related stuff now, berlios, gitorious, forgesvn, others? I think our infrastructure could be leaner - making things easier for new contributors and for the admins.

There should be just berlios (svn) and gitorious (git). We moved to those because forgesvn is going to be shut down. Most of our current development happens on gitorious now, berlios is used as an archive for projects that didn't get converted to git, and for projects where the maintainers had strong objections against switching to git. Greetings http://gitorious.org/opensuse https://developer.berlios.de/projects/opensuse/ -- Thomas Schmidt (tschmidt [at] suse.de) SUSE Linux Products GmbH :: Research & Development :: Tools "Don't Panic" Douglas Adams (1952 - 11.05.2001) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On Thursday 25 March 2010 23:37:28 Karsten König wrote:

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So I am supposed to post a lot of individual emails? I am not be snarky, I am trying to understand what the best approach to take is.

Yes, it eases the workflow, your mail touched alot of maintainers workplaces right now so everyone would need to open up his own awnser thread for proper handling now anyway =)

+1. if you watch profligate typists like aseigo in action on mailing lists, they have learned to split up their verbiage into a mail per sub-topic. It helps ensure nothing gets overlooked. Will -- Will Stephenson, KDE Developer, openSUSE Boosters Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On 03/26/2010 08:59 AM, Martin Schlander wrote:

Torsdag den 25. marts 2010 23:33:07 skrev Andrew Wafaa:

...

On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 09:03 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:

...

The main thing we're missing is a clear goal and direction. Wanting to be "the best community distro available" is too vague and can mean a ton of different things to different people. As a comparison I think Ubuntu and Fedora have goals and identities that are operational and that it's pretty clear to most people what they are and what they want to do.

So what you're saying is we need both long-term *and* short term goals that are realistic and achievable? That makes perfect sense, and I whole heartily agree. As long as we don't fix the direction or targets too much in stone then it shouldn't be a problem to achieve; I think one thing we as a community need to do better is be more agile. Any chance of examples from Ubuntu & Fedora just so that I (and maybe others) can see what you mean, please?

I mean we need one main, long term goal and purpose, that can be summed up in a single sentence - which is operational enough to guide technical priorities and decision making, as well as focus marketing.

Ubuntu have their bug #1 - breaking MS dominance. Wanting to be the "Linux for hobbits".

Fedora is all about bleeding edge and free software.

What is openSUSE about? Some say it's bleeding edge for geeks and testbed for SLE... some say it's quite stable and user friendly... some say it's for experts... some say it's professional and polished. But it can't be all those things at the same time, and the result is we have people pulling in different directions cuz there's no real agreement on what openSUSE should and shouldn't be.

Personally I'd like to see openSUSE as "the professional and productive GNU/Linux for home users" - I think we're in a good position to do that, but there are definitely forces pulling in different directions.

I would prefer professionnal and productive GNU/Linux for professionnal (People making money with their computer) This type of people would paid support and have a big interest in a lean tool. We have loose some of these people with some lazy release of geecko. We must made a stop to that. Home users are very volatile in terms of market. my 2 cents -- Bruno Friedmann -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Bruno Friedmann wrote:

On 03/26/2010 01:40 PM, Will Stephenson wrote:

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On Thursday 25 March 2010 22:08:41 Karsten König wrote:

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If you open the "network settings" module in KDE's system settings, it tells you that opensuse is not supported, then lists all the supported platforms (suse linux 9.1 is the most recent suse version supported). I think having support for opensuse in the KDE network settings module is important.  I might be missing a package that provides support, but if there is such a package it should probably be a dependency.

huh? For me it's the config stuff for networkmanager

Is Todd referring to the KCM installed by the 'networkconf' subpackage of kdeadmin4?

Will

Yes I think, this package are unusable on openSUSE What to do with that could be another question :-)

Yes, that is probably what I am referring to. I know I have that installed. -Todd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Tejas Guruswamy wrote:

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I think we need a fix for the kdm configuration issue.  There is already a kdm configuration tool, I think we should be allowed to use it (I'm not implying we are purposefully blocked from using, just that it cannot be used currently).

Yes, YaST /etc/sysconfig editor is not quite as intuitive, but the /etc/sysconfig way of configuring thing is well entrenched in SUSE. The only solutions are to hack the KDM configuration module to modify sysconfig (major change from upstream) or disable it (as is done now).

Except it isn't really disabled, you can use it just fine, it just doesn't do anything, it fails silently (there is no indication that your changes will have no effect). If it doesn't work and isn't going to work, it should probably be removed. A third solution would be to make some changes to make the system configuration module more configurable by distributions then push those patches upstream, although this would of course be more work. Currently the installation of themes through the kcm module works, you just can't select the themes. I don't think the current sysconfig approach is usable for ordinary users, they need to look up the file name of the theme they want (with no real indication of where to even look), then type it in. I would suspect we don't want beginning users messing with sysconfig at all. Whatever the case I think the kcm module should either work, give a warning that it will not work, have the parts that won't work be totally disabled, or not exist at all. I would say that is another general issue that should probably be fixed. Packages that don't work and aren't going to work because of how opensuse does things should probably just be removed entirely or have the parts that aren't going to work be disabled. Supplying packages that are can be started up and worked with but which don't actually do anything does not seem like a good approach to me. -Todd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

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Currently the packages like kdeedu, kdeadmin, and kdegames do not do much beyond just installing the libkdeedu and libkdegames packages, which is fairly redundant. I think it would be better if these installed the software that is part of the respective KDE svn repositories. So, for example, installing kdeedu would install all of packages built from software in the kdeedu svn repository. This would also simplify the kde4-games ymp, it would just need to depend on the kdegames package and any other games not packaged with a KDE sc, instead of all the games individually.

there are patterns for that, they are the proper way to go for package bundles

Then we should probably get rid of those packages, since they don't do anything useful.

They are basicly the same as the kdelibs package, kdelibs itself doesn't do anything useful either (I think, maybe there are some applications but let's not go down to hair splitting) They contain the library every game / admin / edu package requires so if I only want khangman I get khangman and kdegames You could name it libkdegames or so, but it's like the repo names, changing requires annoying work =)

As I said, there already is a libkdegames. All kdegames does is depend on libkdegames. That is why I said it was redundant. It also suggests the kde games, but since suggestions don't seem to do anything in yast2, that doesn't really help any. -Todd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org

On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 11:31 -0400, todd rme wrote:

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:25 PM, Tejas Guruswamy wrote:

...

...

I think we need a fix for the kdm configuration issue. There is already a kdm configuration tool, I think we should be allowed to use it (I'm not implying we are purposefully blocked from using, just that it cannot be used currently).

Yes, YaST /etc/sysconfig editor is not quite as intuitive, but the /etc/sysconfig way of configuring thing is well entrenched in SUSE. The only solutions are to hack the KDM configuration module to modify sysconfig (major change from upstream) or disable it (as is done now).

Except it isn't really disabled, you can use it just fine, it just doesn't do anything, it fails silently (there is no indication that your changes will have no effect). If it doesn't work and isn't going to work, it should probably be removed. A third solution would be to make some changes to make the system configuration module more configurable by distributions then push those patches upstream, although this would of course be more work. Currently the installation of themes through the kcm module works, you just can't select the themes.

[SNIP] Sorry chaps, but any chance we could stay on topic please? I appreciate the original comment, but responding on this thread dilutes the discussion and we then lose any useful content on the topic. Thanks, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa, openSUSE Member: FunkyPenguin. PGP: 0x3A36312F openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org