----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Kofler" <kevin.kofler(a)chello.at>
To: kde(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 3:47:01 AM
Subject: Re: Fedora plasma and Fedora scientific
Amit Saha wrote:
> I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this
> morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product.
> Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the
> objectives and audience of both.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. My comments inline.
We are still discussing whether we want to move forward with the
Plasma
Product as currently proposed in the first place.
The current proposal is something in the middle between the current KDE spin
and the current Scientific spin, and IMHO it would be a poor replacement for
at least one of them, if not for both. I'd expect a scientific Product to
ship scientific applications ON the live image, but that makes the image
huge and much less interesting for other user groups. I'm a scientist
myself, but I don't think forcing our scientific applications on all KDE
users by default is going to fly (but neither is NOT shipping those
applications on a Product which claims to be science-oriented going to fly).
Completely agree with that one.
Another issue is, what if somebody comes up with a great new scientific
application that is not KDE-based? Would we still want to feature that
application? (From a science standpoint, we would, from a KDE standpoint,
probably not.) Right now, all the flagship applications I can think of
happen to be KDE- or Qt-based (kdeedu apps, Kile, LyX etc.; if we also
target educational applications for young children, there's also GCompris
that is being ported to Qt), but that could change. You already ship (or
used to ship) some non-KDE stuff like Eclipse (whose relevance to science
eludes me, to be honest) on your Scientific spin.
That's a great point. The reason Fedora Scientific is KDE based is not because
applications like Kile and others are Qt or KDE based. It just turned out that *I*
happened
to be a newly converted KDE user when I was first initiating the work on the spin.
And there were not much of a feedback *against* KDE, so that's how it
has been. If there is an application which requires me to pull in non-KDE stuff, I
definitely
will include it, like I already do. Besides Eclipse [1], I think there is some other
application which pulls in some GTK libraries as well. So, that way Fedora Scientific
is kept aloof from being strict about not shipping software because it's not Qt
based.
[1] The reason for having Eclipse is so that programmers more comfortable with using an
IDE
already find it installed. You have a point regarding it's relevance to Science and
it
doesn't probably have a place on the Spin, but well..
The proposal in its current state mainly came up as a compromise attempt
because several FESCo and Board members are opposed to another workstation-
focused Product and thus want to see a different target user base, but they
are still not happy with the proposal as it stands now, and IMHO we already
compromised too much.
I see, well, ok thanks for the update. I will keep an eye on future discussions.