Edubuntu: Gallium vs. Kalzium

hi,

i'm attaching an answer i send to one of the ~300 rant mails
i got the
last few days about that issue, that might clarify that a
bit. (note
that this mail is one of the morte ffiendly ones)

we could go on shipping kdeedu, but surely there had to
change a lot: 
a) split up the 32MB big package into smaller ones 
b) make it depend on plain QT instead of the kdelibs, make
it ship its
own help docs so we dont have to pull in all the kde help
for one app
(which in turn depend on 10's of MBs of unused KDE stuff we
are forced
to ship/install)
c) make the language packs smaller (split them or something
like that)
indeed thats rather a problem on the (k,ed)ubuntu side and
not upstream

if it were possible for us to have as small packages as
possible with as
less dependencies as possible, so pulling in kdeedu wouldnt
eat up >=
~100MB on the CD for us it would surely ease a lot here.

please note as well that gallium is a community project it
is *not* an
official edubuntu project (even though i'd include it on the
CD if it
would give us the same featureset kalzium does)

please also dont discourage people working on a GNOME based
edu set of
apps gnome is lacking a lot here so let them do what they
want, even
though *my* ideal world would have desktop independent apps
that can be
easily shared between desktop environments i.e. have a look
at the
ubiquity installer or hwdb-gui in ubuntu, its possible to
write apps in
a way that you can use them in either desktop environment
with their own
dedicated frontend and as i understood gallium should work
that way ...

but sadly, according to the tone all these mails hitting my
inbox the
last week had there is no easy way getting both worlds
together...
if people start threatening me personally for something like
that (i'm
not even involved with gallium) i think we still have to go
a long long
way to get both worlds together. 
i was voting for having kdeedu in edubuntu from the
beginning and was
fighting for having the best of both worlds on our CD (even
though i
moan about every app i have to drop with every new release
due to the
space constraints this gives us) but that mail attack from
the kde side
against me personally (about a tech problem we try to solve)
starts
really making me reconsider my opinion here.

... very disappointed ...

ciao
	oli
hi,
Am Samstag, den 30.09.2006, 11:56 +0200 schrieb Markus
Büchele:
> I cannot accept that brilliant application such as
Kalzium are being replaced 
> out of ideological reasons.
> 
> Under such circumstances I must seriously question the
leadership qualities of 
> the project managers. If you dislike KDE, say so, but
remember that you put 
> yourself in the fanatics corner if you try to get rid
of any trace of it NOT 
> FOR QUALITY REASONS BUT FOR IDEOLOGICAL REASONS.
there are no ideological reasons ...
we need to ship a GNOME desktop simply because we rely on
the
maintenance and integration work that goes in there from the
whole
ubuntu distro team (the edubuntu team is way to small to
maintain either
of the full desktops, the special stuff the installer needs
to do *and*
the CDs) 

we are also bound to 700MB on the CDs since we send them out
through the
shipit program to a lot of countries where people have not
enough
bandwith to download an iso themselves.

to include kdeedu on the CD we have to spend 150-200MB of
this space and
have to cut down a lot of the desktop functionallity. kdeedu
depends on
the kde libs and way worse on the kde language packs (the
german
language pack for kde is 20MB alone) 

that limits our set of applications a lot ... the decision
is based on
the calculation that we are either able to ship 10-12 kdeedu
apps or ~
20-50 more gnome apps that dont pull in the kdelibs packages
or
additional language packs...

as you might be able to guess from our decision to still
keep kdeedu due
to kalzium and not to replace it before an at least
equivalent
replacement is written, we very much appreciate the high
quality of that
application and are willing to live with the space
constraints it gives
us for some further time. most of the other kdeedu apps
either have
replacements or are easily rewritten in gtk. kalziums high
featureset
and quality isnt... its currently the only app that makes us
keep kdeedu
and the resulting "waste" of CD space. 

also gallium isnt thought as a full replacement for kdeedu,
it shall
just be another frontend that gives us the opportunity to
drop the
kdelibs/langpack and other bloated packages we have, it will
still use
the kalzium datasets and we wont replace kalzium until we
can provide at
least the same quality of functionallity kalzium has to
offer.
(we have no QT programmers in the team, but if a plain QT
version of
kalzium was available that would ease a lot and make the gtk
replacement
unneeded, the KDE philosophy of keeping everything in as
huge packages
as possible might stand in the way here though)

please understand that we simply dont want to treat people
in the
countries with less bandwith and no DVD readers/writers
available as
second class citizens, we want to ship the best software we
can for
education (and thus decided for kalzium as *the* chemnistry
app)
but the limitations it brings us are quite big and thats one
way to
resolve it ...

i'm open for any suggestions to solve the problem
differently but its
surely no ideological but a simple technical decision
decision behind it
as you hopefully can see from the above arguments.

ciao
	oli
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Edubuntu: Gallium vs. Kalzium

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