
PolishLinux has an
interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.
Member since:
2005-07-06
According to what the KDE developers themselves have said for years, your opinion are wrong. They strongly reccomend that the packages are split up for end users. They also go to great length to ensure the build system support this, and maintain strict module separation to make this easier for the distributors.
The KDE project only provide source packages, and it's more efficient to provide the source packaged as it's done today doing the splitting with the build system. The recommendation for the distributions are to split up the packages, but the distributions are free to use the strategy they feel supports their users best.
And that Krita and the rest of the KOffice packages on windows are not split, are by all accounts simply a case of not yet done. Not surprisingly since KOffice 2 are still in beta, and that the Windows didtribution team are very small, they have tasks they deem more important.