[arch-dev-public] KDE: Call for a Co-Maintainer and an unstable repo

Aaron Griffin aaronmgriffin at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 17:34:55 EST 2008


On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have some KDE related points I want to discuss here:
>
> 1) I need someone who helps me to maintain KDE. It develops quite fast and 4.2
>   introduces some new features, moredependencies and we need to add/update
>   some packages in [extra].
>
>   I know that you allready have more than enough to do. So if ther is noone
>   among us we might ask if there is some TU willing to help.
>
>   With some additional help the following issues can be fixed:
>
> 2) KDE-4.2 will be released in a few weeks. So it makes sense to start
>   packaing beta and rc snapshots. What do you think about a kde-unstable
>   repo? I think it could be live in <package>/repos/kde-unstable and db
>   -update should be able to handle this. The size of this repo would be about
>   350MB for each architecture.
>
> 3) The package dependencies of KDE are goning to be a mess. If you install the
>   kde group you will find nearly the whole [extra] repo on your harddrive.
>   Some of these deps are only on package level and can be fixed. E.g. kde
>   depends on gnome due to some "strange" deps of ghostscript and gstreamer
>   for example.
>
>   Having a look at 4.2 this situation is getting worse. KDE is more or less
>   modular, but they put a lot of apps in one package like kdegraphics. The
>   only sane way to solve this issue is to split some packages. Optdepends
>   does not help here because some features are enabled at runtime if certain
>   files exist. Support for splitting packages in makepkg/devtools woulbd be
>   more than helpfull if not needed. Who wants to install java, php, ruby,
>   perl etc. just because some apps in kdebase makes use of the python
>   -bindings which iare included in the kdebindings package?
>
>
> Summing things up, this is a call for increasing man power. I need somone to
> help with packaging KDE (and its dependencies) and somone to implement support
> for splitting packages in makepkg (and don't forget about the devtools and db-
> scripts here)

Go ahead and start with the kde-unstable repo, I created the dirs on
gerolde so you should be able to do it at any time.

Regarding a KDE maintainer - I would *love* to have people brought on
board for specific purposes like this. Feel free to propose it to the
TUs. We can pull someone on board for KDE maintenance. Just make sure
they're aware that the job is KDE, anything else they maintain should
be secondary



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