KDE Applications consistency between KDE4 and Frameworks based applications

[Michael Palimaka]

On 04/02/16 08:26, Raymond Wooninck wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> I wanted to raise the concern regarding the consistency between all the 
> packages delivered within the KDE Applications releases. It seems that we have 
> certain libs/applications moved to Frameworks already, despite that they are 
> still a dependency for a KDE4 based application.

Thanks for raising this issue - as a packager the inconsistency within a
given KDE Applications release can certainly be frustrating.

> Examples of these are libkgeomap, libkipi, libksane, libkexiv, etc.  These are 
> all dependent libraries for Digikam and Kipi-plugins. These libraries were 
> removed from the digikam sources with the latest digikam release as that they 
> were provided separately. With KDE applications 15.12 these libraries are now 
> Frameworks based, but digikam actually is still KDE4. This creates the issue 
> that digikam can no longer be build. 

KF5-based versions of libkipi, libksane, and libkexiv can fortunately
coexist with their KDE4-based versions, but indeed that is not the case
for every package.

> Another example is the switch for kdepimlibs, kdepim and kdepim-runtime. Since 
> 15.08 we have a full framework based PIM suite, but this delivers some issues 
> with regards to other dependencies on kdepimlibs. An example is kgpg, which is 
> KDE4 based, but has a hard requirement on kdepimlibs. Even if packagers would 
> keep the kde4-kdepimlibs package, I wonder if kgpg would even be able to 
> access anything that the frameworks PIM suite offers. 

Whichever option is chosen (causing more inconsistency between distros),
the possible results for the user are not great:

1. Where's my kgpg gone?
2. Why doesn't kgpg work with my kmail? (if it is even possible to KDE4
and KF5-based kdepimlibs stuff installed at the same time)

> I fear that we would only see an increase in these situations, which would 
> lead to either one of the following situations:
> 
> 1)	Distributions will drop whatever is no longer building.
> 2)	Distributions are forced to keep a big part of the KDE4 libraries in order 
> to keep everything building. This however is not a guarantee that things are 
> actually working for the users.
> 
> I wonder how other distro KDE packagers are seeing this and how they are 
> planning to resolve it.  Also I wonder if we, as packagers, can expect 
> anything from the upstream developers to help in this situation. 

We are continuing to try to stay as close to upstream as possible, but
right now it is just not possible to ship Applications as the same
cohesive unit as KDE 4. We are evaluating each conflict on a
case-by-case basis and judging for ourselves what we should ship or skip.

The situation could be improved by increasing communication/cooperating
between packagers, the release team, and individual application
maintainers. Even if downstream does report a conflict (this doesn't
always happen), there's not always anything the release team can do
(report was made too late, non-responsive/unmaintained applications).

It's a shame there weren't more replies to your mail - if we all
collated our issues maybe we could formulate a plan to fix them in time
for 16.04.