Arch Linux

The Qt4 main package is bundled with designer, linguist, qdbusviewer, and assistant, when in fact many (if not most) people who have Qt4 installed do not have a need for any of theses applications on their system. From my own use, Qt4 is a necessary requirement for other apps such as Spotify, VLC, and Skype, and I find no need for these programs cluttering my app list in Gnome-Shell.

Further, due to the 4 apps (and their corresponding .desktop files) being included in one package, new package managers such as Gnome-Software and Muon can not make use of 'app-folder' features in which to tuck these unnecessary icons away, as only one of the 4 .desktop files registers in the package manger, as upstream neither project has the capacity to handle packages with more than one application within. Likewise, the response from upstream gnome-software can be seen here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745277

Users wishing to simply uninstall these packages for bloat reasons cannot do so due to it removing Qt4 in its entirety. Conversely, users wishing to install the qt-designer and other applications may find it confusing due to no package bearing their name, but rather having them imbedded in a base package that has no indication of packages being bundled within.

I propose packaging Qt4-base, designer, linguist, qdbusviewer, and assistant as separate packages. It seems to be the way these applications are packaged on other distributions, and it seems an intuitive solution to reducing unnecessary bloat, clarifying these applications for those searching for them, and solving issues with new package mangers.


**I would also like to draw attention to the way Qt5 is packaged, and how Qt5 puts these 4 apps in a Qt5-tools package, which I would argue could be split even further to a 1 application per package paradigm, but at least avoids the main issue of bloat. At the very least, for confusions sake, we should find a standard way of packaging both of these frameworks.