Am Donnerstag, 25. März 2010 23:11:04 schrieb todd rme:
2010/3/25 Karsten König <remur@gmx.net>:
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.
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 =)
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?
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 =)
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.
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
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