Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kde (245 mails)

[todd rme <toddrme2178@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Andrew Wafaa <awafaa@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
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