Re: [gentoo-dev] Split KDE packages?

[Dylan Carlson <absinthe@pobox.com>]

On Monday 27 January 2003 10:57 pm, Stephan Hermann wrote:
>
> I don't think this is a good idea.
> On RedHat distribution you got this foolish system (of course binary
> packages).
> You don't know which application is in the normal kde distribution or
> just a plain application like whatever.
>
> If you see kde as one complete desktop enviroment, then you let kde as
> is (compiling all applications in one package the same time), there
> aren't a lot of patches for kde in the last few months, so we can live
> with it as is.

You're arguing against something I don't think you understand at all. 

If KDE were broken out to smaller ebuilds, there would still be a master 
ebuild to bring them all together as one bundle, so therefore users would 
not have to remember what pieces make up a complete KDE bundle.  

The end result would be absolutely no different.  People who want the whole 
KDE bundle would still get the whole KDE bundle installed the same as it 
would be otherwise.

What it gives us is the ability to update one small piece of KDE without 
having to update and recompile the whole thing in the event of a patch.  
And between releases there are in fact a ton of patches that go out.

The only reason this hasn't been done already is because there isn't any 
obvious solution to get around the increase in compile time -- which is a 
result of having ./configure run over and over for each separate ebuild.  

Once that's eliminated or mitigated, the users wouldn't know any 
difference.  But I guarantee everyone would know the difference when it 
comes time to patch KDE up for inevitable serious bugs or security flaws.  

It would save a lot of people a lot of download and recompile time if it's 
between major.minor release versions.

Cheers,
Dylan Carlson [absinthe@pobox.com]

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list