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

[Achim Bohnet]

On Friday, 26. January 2007 13:13, Tom Albers wrote:
> 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,

There now some work going on simplifying the user interface.  So hopefully
soon many of the technical background will be hidden.

> 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.

Because digikam and showfoto share common infrastructure (like kio stuff)
Making digikam and showfoto independent need another -base or -common
pkgs.

Noone ever pestered my about showfoto depends on digikam yet, so I did
not bother.

> > 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

Okay, noted ;)

> 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).

Showfoto still only knows about list of files or all files in a dir.

> > 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.

I can put this on my todo (medium prio).

If we do it, I would suggest to put everything that digikamimageplugins
needs to build into this -base/common pkg.   I still don't like to
create a libdigikam and -dev pkgs, because the digikam's shared libs
break API as needed and where never intendet to be used by other tools.

Achim

> > 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
> 
> 
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> 

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