Bugzilla – Bug 121936
No Standalone Kexi package
Last modified: 2005-12-16 16:27:28 UTC
(previously reported for 9.3): SuSE has older Kexi package compared to other distributions, like Debian. In May 2005 there was 0.9 standalone release of Kexi (without KOffice), but unfourtanely SuSE skipped it. This could be defined as "kexi-standalone-0.9" or so. See http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php?HintsForMakingKexiPackages for more information about how to define needed packages. Standalone Kexi releases are not single events - at least half of Kexi releases will be provided as standalone, so my advice is that it's worth to create valid specs. There will be no 0.9 and 1.0 releases bundled with KOffice (only 1.1), so without kexi-standalone, SuSE will stay without support for KOffice databases. Feel free to ask me for help while defining the specs.
is there a reason kexi doesn't manage to release together with koffice ? :/
Kexi can and still will release together with KOffice. But at it's current state this is not enough. At current stage of development, every 5 or 6 months there are main features added what people are waiting for. Other KOffice core applications are developed about 5 years longer, hence we could say these are far more in stabilization stage. Mostly because of this, major KOffice versions are released every circa 12 months, with 4 months-long freeze periods. The near plan, I guess even for KOffice 1.5, is to release standalone Kexi only, but with respect to release schedules, so the same day when KOffice beta1 (in this case: 1.5) is released, appropriate Kexi beta1 is released. The same for -rc, stable and updates. Announcements can be merged... Binaries and source packages can be kept together, "recommended" flag can be set (e.g. for Debian, I don't know if RPM allows this) in Kexi so installing KOffice can be recommended to users to take advantage of integration with KOffice. It's mostly just all about one set of specifications, not two, so there will be no uncertainty what the current stable version is, and which one will work with KOffice (without conflicts) and which won't. I'd like to make your and other disctro makers work as simple as possible from-release-to-release and ensure you can take advantage of current stable versions, by using _linear_ versions numbering. Now two specs differ for "bundled" and "unbundled" Kexi branches. There was also a problem because user can try to install both bundled and standalone Kexi packages; There are issues with hosting translation files when two types of releasing is involved. Moreover, each Kexi KDE services needed to be renamed in standalone version, to avoid conflict with bundled version; there was too large risk of overlooking something and too much testing & maintenance overhead.
we won't do this. We checked and it's too much effort for us. So we will continue shipping kexi as it comes with koffice. If you want to ship a standalone kexi version, you're free to conflict your package with koffice-database.
I thought about this not a single time. Standalone/bundled releases are in fact complicated and time consuming and I am aware it's true especially for SUSE packagers. THe problem is that not all koffice apps are developed equally actively (or just not all are at the same level of maturity). Then, I will try to find an agreement within KOffice project to invent a way for intermediate releases of KOffice so there should not be a conflict. I received a note that except Kexi, also Krita could benefit from this.