On Fri, 25 May 2001, Ben Burton wrote: > > Although best would be a KDE-theme installer. Are the themes > > available individually anywhere, in a format consistent enough for > > automating the debianization and installation? > > By this do you mean an empty debian package whose configuration procedure is > to download themes and install them on the fly?
...or a packaged program that does for KDE-themes what apt-get does for Debian (kinda like what the Perl maintainers have done with CPAN). > The themes are available on the web in a format that's very easily > debianised/installed. However, the connection between my machine and the > Russian server is quite flaky, and I recall the author saying the problem was > at his/her end (although for the life of me I can't find the email). Thus I > would be happier for the themes to be in debian per se. :) Hmmm, OK. Maybe he needs a mirror. I'm one of those people running KDE on a small system, a very small and slow system (about a gig of hdd space and connecting at 28.8kbps)... Huge packages can be a major pain because they take a long time to download (feels worse if I really only want a small piece of the package), and I may need to make room just to download them (especially if they come along with the daily system upgrade). The dpkg/apt DB overhead is almost inconsequential (about 25M, ~2% of my hdd space, and I'm tracking testing/unstable/source). I have used a system so small that 25M was too much overhead, but then I didn't even use dselect (would not have used apt) and ignored any "huge-arse" packages of `toy' stuff -- but as long as I had enough room to download a .deb, and it fit onto a floppy, I could install it. If you do one huge package you will be more likely to leave out people with small systems than if you do a bunch of small packages. If the DB overhead of lots of packages is too much for users with small systems they will likely find a way around it. e.g., (packages.debian.org --> download --> "dpkg -i..."), or keeping on top of the caches and backups and only tracking what they need to. If the total number of packages is overwhelming... tough, but that is a programming problem (devise a better interface to the package pool) and should not be solved by limiting options. - Bruce
