fedora-kde target audience, draft rfc

[Thomas Janssen]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 6:16 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Thomas Janssen wrote:
>> Since i was the one who suggested it.. :) I do understand you but, if
>> the KDE alternative is just giving a very basic functionality and is
>> having problems (VPN IIRC) then we should consider using what works
>> well, gives more output, does not suggest (again at the beginning of
>> an update to reboot) stupid things.
>
> Uh, VPN problems are a NM/KNM issue, not a KPK one.

Whoops, i mixed a NetworkManager issue in here, sorry :)

> The "suggests a reboot too early" bug is bizarre indeed, I should look if I
> can silence those reboot prompts. (I'm for silencing them entirely, KDE
> users are smart enough to know when they need to restart their computer. ;-)
> It'd also probably be the fastest way to zap that bug once and for all.)
>
> Another thing I noticed is that KPK doesn't recognize different update types
> anymore after the latest PK update. :-(
>
> I think what needs to happen here is that more people need to test PK
> updates in testing and that those updates need to be BLOCKED from getting
> pushed to stable if they break KPK. Throwing out KPK is entirely the wrong
> solution for such regressions introduced by PK updates. (Neither of the
> above bugs happened before the latest PK update. It's not KPK's fault that
> PK breaks backwards compatibility under it.)
>
> One problem is that PK/KPK (and GPK, too) moves so fast that, even when I'm
> running the latest Fedora release, I'm still always running an already
> deprecated branch, so spending time fixing things might not pay off. (But on
> the other hand, F12 still has 9 months or so to live, so I guess fixing F12
> issues is beneficial in any case.)

I feel sorry there. I know you have already a lot of work and you do a
great job. I badly need to learn to code to be able to help out a bit
more.

>> KPK is in my eyes, ugly, unreliable and too basic. I suggested to you
>> as well to try the latest GNOME-packagekit to see what i mean.
>> I think KPK is on it's way, but not yet ready.
>
> Yet KPK just works. (Neither of the above 2 bugs is a showstopper, they're
> just minor annoyances that can be easily worked around.)

Well, yeah, it "just" works. It would be good if that two annoyances
are fixed. I know how hard it is sometimes, for various reasons. And
yes, it needs moar testing. I will help out more with testing it, even
i'm a yum updater ;)

>> If we dont want to lose users to GNOME because of not fully working,
>> suggesting stupid things KDE apps, we might better use the
>> alternative, even if it's written GTK/GTK+.
>> By the way, should everybody use the GNOME SPIN as well because there
>> are no QT alternatives for the installed system-config-* utility's in
>> the KDE SPIN? ;)
>
> We actually do have alternatives for some of them, but the GTK+ app gets
> dragged in by Anaconda's dependencies. :-( For example, there is KUser in
> kdeadmin which can be used instead of system-config-users. This Anaconda
> dependency bloat is one of the unsolved problems. Others are stuff I use
> once and never again (e.g. system-config-selinux, to turn the crap off and
> never look at it again). It's not the same as a package updater which users
> will be running daily.

Indeed, that makes it hard to have alternatives installed with the
livecd as we have still the good-old-700MB ones. But to be honest, i
don`t care that much what is used for that system-config-* stuff. Same
here, i use them once in a while. Most times if i use one of them,
just because i'm curious about changes or if a user reports a problem
with it ;)

-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium