Hello,
in OBS in home:llunak:ksuseinstall there are packages branched from
KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop that have one experimental feature added: When a
needed package is not installed, the user is offered its installation.
Currently there is support for debuginfo packages, applications that can open
a specific file type if none is installed and multimedia codecs for Amarok.
The plan is that this feature makes it into 11.3, so please test and provide
feedback.
The things I'm especially interested in:
- the UI and the workflow could quite possibly be improved (currently it uses
Yast modules to save me a lot of work, and it's also done this way because of
a certain catch mentioned below). So, imagine you are Joe User the Clueless
who's just installed 11.3 and think about how this would or would not work
and how it could be improved.
The catch here is that this is not only a technical problem but also a
legal :(. This can quite easily help with the problem of installing packages
that cannot be shipped as a part of openSUSE because of various stupid patent
stuff etc. The problem is that we should not even encourage too much usage of
such packages. Don't ask what that means exactly, because I don't know, and
probably not even lawyers know for sure, but something like "MP3 support is
missing, press Yes to install it from Packman" is simply very unlikely to
make it past our lawyers. I think the guideline could be that the user has to
know it's an extra and that it's not part of openSUSE, and thus has to make
at least some effort, not just confirm a dialog. There is a reason why adding
community repositories in Yast fetches a list of those from a 3rd party site
and knows nothing else than the URL of that list. Yes, this all sucks.
- there could be more places where this could help a lot, either by saving the
default installation size by not installing packages that most users wouldn't
use, or by handling something where such on-demand installation would be
helpful to many users. From 11.2 the Nepomuk/Strigi config module comes to
mind - we had it disabled by default and some parts were not installed, so
enabling it required not only flipping the checkbox but also installing
something. I am not going to patch every single place in KDE where an
optional package could be possibly missing, but it shouldn't be difficult to
handle some mores places where it makes a difference, if you know such cases.
--
Lubos Lunak
openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer
l.lunak(a)suse.cz , l.lunak(a)kde.org
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help(a)opensuse.org