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Okay, this might in the end be much trickier than I am thinking right now, but the idea is this:

Any time I update to a new version of KDE SC from the servers of my distributor (it's opensuse in my case, but I am sure this makes no difference) there are not only the updated KDE applications that are being downloaded, but the bulkier part of the SC consists of the KDE wallpapers and icon-compilations, which I really doubt have been radically updated or changed. Since I do update frequently, these sheer optical parts of the SC amount to a rather high number of MB's ...

Though I do accept, that for reasons of the consistency of version-numbers there might be a reason to pack these laods with the rest of the updates, but shouldn't there be a technique or a mechanism to avoid this? Like only patching the version-numbers if e.g. the wallpaper-package exists on the system?

I know that today we are no more talking about bandwidth a lot, but still ...

Thanks for considering

Jay

Wouldn't that cause problems for people downloading the SC for the first time? Updates via your distro will surely be handling this automatically.

I don't know about OpenSuse, but Arch has option to install either whole KDE SC or user can select which parts he or she wants to install.
So it's up to user whether to install whole KDE SC or not.
But yeah once you decided KDE SC can still be big.
I'll approve it, so that users can decide what would they prefer.

In openSuse I try and alleviate this issue by locking certain large rpms in the Yast sw manager - language files, themes, icons, and marble & marble data (don't use it but Digikam requires it).

When Yast errors out that there's a requirement for one of the locked files then I'll (maybe) let it download and install.

If you open Yast sw manager you can sort on size and determine if the package is worth the size if it's not a requirement - such things as documentation aren't always needed unless you're a developer

One idea might be to have some packages, e.g. the icon set and wallpaper, simply omit the last digit of the version number. E.g, kdebase-4.4.4 wouldn't depend on kdewallpapers-4.4.4, but kdewallpapers-4.4, which would still be installed from kdebase4.4.3.

This is an issue with how openSUSE handles updates (specifically version numbering). It was discussed on the mailing list and they are trying to fix it, but it is not an issue with KDE itself.