How important is comps.xml to us these days? Which packages should be in comps.xml and which not?

Richard Hughes hughsient at gmail.com
Tue Sep 23 16:46:02 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 16:30 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Richard Hughes <hughsient <at> gmail.com> writes:
> > You think we NEED a "KDE Software Development group". PackageKit is not
> > designed for you. Can you explain how having fine grained groups would
> > help people like: http://www.packagekit.org/pk-profiles.html ?
> 
> Well, at least the med student could have a use for a "medical applications" 
> group (which I'm aware does not currently exist, but that's not PackageKit's 
> problem ;-) )

A simple collection (one package) would solve that need, rather than a
whole group of packages that she wouldn't know what any of them did.

> , if not now, at least in the future. And you have only 3 
> profiles, that's a pretty small sample of all the users around, I'm sure there 
> are many more users with needs for at least one specialized group (with the end 
> result that _all_ specialized groups are needed).

You cannot design a program for everybody. If you do that, then it's suitable for nobody.

> And another issue is that the library design doesn't allow making a more 
> powerful UI on top of the same library, because the "simple" groups are 
> hardcoded and there's no API to get to the actual groups.

You mean the DBUS API is not sufficient.

> Even if we accept 
> your premise that a package manager for power users necessarily has to be a 
> different application, it would still be nice to be able to build it on the 
> same library. Reinventing the wheel to work around library limitations would be 
> a big waste. For example, KPackageKit could potentially be that "more powerful 
> UI" if the library allowed it.

kpackagekit uses it's own bindings and library. If you actually joined
the upstream mailing list, you can see we are discussing what to do,
perhaps adding another group API to compliment the "simple one".

But now I'm bored, it just seems like you are wasting my time. I listen
most to people that actually contribute code.

Sorry to be blunt.

Richard.





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