On 2011-06-29 Martin wrote:
Tirsdag den 28. juni 2011 15:14:58 skrev Ilya Chernykh:
I first discussed this issue with coolo in private but possible a wider range of ideas may be beneficial.
All of us know that is is sometimes confusing to find a package which belongs to your desktop environment, whether Gnome or KDE. Sometimes you have to look into package's dependencies to find out whether it is written in GTK or Qt.
As the number of desktops increases, the problem only becomes worser.
Currently the packages are classifies using the RPM groups. But for the most packages this groupping only reflects the package's purpose, i.e. network, game or office. This groupping is organized as a tree, and there is no possibility to add another categorization.
An obvious solution is to add a desktop environment name to the package's name such as prefixing all KDE apps with "kde-" or simple "k". But this is also confusing and may require much of work as renaming is not an easy task.
So are there any ideas on how to organize this better?
If people don't know the underlying technologies of the apps they're installing, they prolly don't care - and why should they.
If some people do worry a lot about the frameworks and libraries used by their apps, they need some real concerns in their life. There's no need for openSUSE to spend time feeding into more of this silly toolkit purism nonsense.
Agreed. While Ilya has a point that some apps don't honour the desktop settings very well there are quite a few ways around that these days. With Oxygen-GTK, GTK apps follow 90% of the relevant settings in KDE and I'd much rather see work in finishing the last 10% (like using native file dialogs etc) than separating the two further... I would even propose to use the upcoming oxygen-gtk 2.0 as default style in GNOME to ensure a consistent look if one uses KDE apps in it. Oxygen- gtk 2.0 will have native (gtk) configuration etc so that would be a nice step forward for the integration. Next up would be using native file dialogs in each desktop, I suppose. Of course, when a Gnome or KDE dev develops a KDE/Qt style which fits in with the default GNOME 3 theme, we could go the other way. Or patch Qt to pick the GNOME style when running in GNOME and GTK to pick oxygen-gtk when running in KDE. Actually, the first thing is supposed to work but doesn't for me.
Btw., afaik the Ubuntu Software Center installs dependencies without even informing the user about them. Which makes a lot of sense. Unless you have a 8GB SSD, the 40-odd mb KDE or GNOME libraries would add to a system are pretty darn irrelevant.
Anyway. The artificial split between KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK is an annoyance which probably won't go away because many ppl still have an irrational hate for one of the other, which is why Ubuntu (of all distro's) has already surpassed the "We proudly ship both" distro (us) by having Qt in the default installation despite being oh so GTK based and having a crappy KDE version. Should've been us... Instead, we re-create GTK or Qt tools/apps in the other toolkit because 'it offers better integration' and 'saves 40 mb of room for the libs from the other side'. We should follow mandriva and ship the 'best of both worlds' on our liveCD's. Both CD's should have Krita, digiKam, the Gimp, Cheese, etc. Just the best in their respective fields... That way we re-inforce the good apps & don't encourage silly rewrites of apps from 'the other camp'. /me dreams on Sorry for the sudden rant... I know it won't happen.