On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:40 PM, 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.
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