On Freitag 12 Februar 2010, Zeerak Waseem wrote: > On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:53:04 +0100, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> > > wrote: > > On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:19:43 +0100, Zeerak Waseem wrote: > >> But I do find it silly, that the various applications that aren't > >> dependent of the DE, to require a dependency of the DE. It just seems > >> a bit backwards to me :-) I simply don't understand. > > > > That just shows that they are still partially dependent on the DE, KMail > > also needs various KDE libraries. KDE was designed as a cohesive DE, not > > just a bunch of applications with a common look and feel. KDE apps are > > intended to be run on a KDE desktop, anything else is a nice bonus. > > Indeed, and it is a noble pursuit. > But from a marketing aspect, it would make more sense to have things that > aren't -vital- for the app, unlike kde-libs in this case, to be soft (is > this the correct term?) dependencies. > Both aspects could be satisfied by having symantic-desktop as an optional > dep. It's not a vital function for kmail to be able to tag and index all > the files on the computer (which is what the symantic-desktop does if I > understand correctly), it's a nifty thing for KDE users, and soon probably > Gnome users as well, but for anyone else, it's a nifty thing -if- they > feel the need for it. Much like most other bits of software :-) > > In the end there isn't a right or wrong, but just a standpoint. Some don't > mind the bloat (we can agree that it's bloat if you're just going to > disable the function as soon as it's been installed, right?) and don't > consider it to be the slightest bit akin to bloat, whilst to others it's > an unnecessary feature forced on them (mainly thinking of the people not > using kde, but also those kde-users that just disable it) and thus becomes > bloat.
and luckily for you, there are a lot of 'soft' dependencies. kmail does not force you to install konqueror. It does not force you to install plasma- desktop or systemsettings. It does not force you to install the printing manager ....
