packaging rant

[John Aldrich]

I don't know if this is the proper list to post this to or not. However, 
there seems to be a problem with the way that, at least KDE apps are 
packaged as monolithic packages. That is, if you want some aspects of KDE 
Multimedia, you have to get *all* of KDE-MultiMedia, you can't just pick 
and choose what parts you want. 

It would seem to me that it would be simpler to have the "basic" required 
sub-systems as one package and then package all the individual apps that 
depend on that basic sub-system as separate packages. I'm not a programmer, 
but it doesn't seem to me that it should be that hard.

Other distributions seem to be able to get away with this, so why not 
Fedora? I posted on a local LUG list about the problems I was having 
yesterday and earlier this morning with KMail and one of my fellow geeks on 
that list pointed out that Debian (I think it was) allows one to 
selectively install apps.

I don't want to completely revamp the whole distribution, but in my not-so-
humble opinion, there need to be some changes so that things aren't 
packaged as huge, monolithic packages. I mean, come on... you shouldn't be 
required to have all of KDE-Multimedia if you just want KMixer. Sure there 
are going to be major sub-systems that KMixer requires, but why should 
someone be forced to take every Multimedia app that KDE has just to get 
KMixer?

Is this something that can be looked into?