[Pkg-kde-extras] DISCUSS: split digikam into digikam and showfoto

[Tom Albers]

Hi Mark, 

It is good that we discuss these things more often imho.  I would welcome some sort of a meeting on a regular interval to discuss things related to kde-extra's, but I'm getting OT here.

fwiw, a response from me:

> Whilst, showfoto is a useful application viewer in its own right and could
> stand alone as a image viewer, arn't we just making more package bloat by
> splitting it off into its own package. What are the advantages we are trying to
> archive?

Personaly I'm finding that digiKam is focussing more and more at the professional side of the spectrum. Showfoto is a simple application, yet powerfull due to the imageplugins and the kipi plugins. So I think they are aiming at a different target group. For me, I love showfoto and I prefer an older digiKam version (ow, did i say that out loud?)

> I don't think upstream are about to split showfoto off into a separate tarball
> and development path.

True. But when I was upstream, we had the consensus that it should be possible to have an independant showfoto, only with a build dependency on the rest of digikam, that's why splitting it upstream was never done.

> Also if it does split then digikam needs to Depend on it and things like the
> showfoto manpage also need to go across which haven't been brought across in
> svn.debian.

Why should digikam depend on showfoto? Should not be necessary.

> I can only see very limited cases where a user is going to have showfoto
> installed and not want digikam, I don't think this justifies the split.

/me is one
Although it is debatable, I think that considering the two target groups, two completely different applications and an upstream who always had this seperation in mind, that a split is justifyable. But from a debian perspective were the amount of packages needs to be kept small, I can imagen that this is not worth it. But you can judge that better than I can do that.

> Also are we sure there are no dependencies between the two?

When I was upstream there were none.
 
> Ie, is libdigikam needed, or any of the kio_digikam* needed by showfoto?

>From memory, the KIO's were primarily needed for the album handling (streaming the images to the view), showfoto operates directly on disk, not with a database and has no concept of albums (last time i checked, again this could be wrong or outdated).

> In fact in svn.debian showfoto is shown as Depends on digikam, so if the two
> are always installed together, then why split them?

showfoto should only depend at build time on digikam, not at runtime.

> If we want to bring attention to the fact that showfoto is different and
> available, then why not include an additional paragraph in the description of
> digikam?

Again, I don't have a strong feeling for splitting or keeping them together. I do think that the maintanance of a package is easier when kubuntu and debian use the same. I can see some advantages for the split, so personaly I'm fine with it.

Toma