[Digikam-devel] Do we need a KF5-based version of libkgeomap?

[Tobias Leupold]

Hi :-)

>  - Are you going to port KPhotoAlbum to KF5?

I think there will definitely be a KF5 port of KPA eventually. At the moment, 
no such action is going on, but I think when at least a few of the "core" 
developers of KPA begin to use KF5, we will start to port it. It's not such a 
big project after all, we're just a few active developers ... speaking of me, 
Gentoo's stable default KDE is still 4.x, but as soon as Gentoo switches to 
KF5, I would like to have KPA based on Qt5/KF5. I'll definitely work on that 
"when it's time".

>  - What should we better do with libkgeomap at the moment and when
> should it be released, in your opinion?

>From my point of view, the current libkgeomap is just fine, so I think KPA is 
quite happy with the current state of the code. As long as there are no 
critical bugs, I think we can keep on using this code. And, as said, there 
will be surely a KF5 port, and then, we would like to use a new libkgeomap 
version of course. But – always only speaking of me of course – I think 
there's no haze at the moment.

>  - Can you maintain libkgeomap/KF5 as a shared library? (This means
> patch reviews, ABI maintenance, bug fixing/triaging, etc.)

I personally definitely can't :-( I'm quite happy I was able to kind of use 
it. It's a quite complicated library for me as C++/Qt n00b, the "deep" things 
that had to be done have been implemented by Johannes Zierl-Zarl.

After all, the right way would be imho that libkgeomap would be maintained as 
a shared library without a Digikam included codebase (I really don't 
understand that packaging thing in Digikam – either it's an independent 
library or it isn't, why is some library code even packaged with Digikam in 
the first place?!). It was quite an effort for me to convince the KDE folks 
that libkface should be an own KDE project (cf. the move a few months ago). I 
failed to do so with libkgeomap (but I really tried). I think Digikam should 
depend on a shared libkgeomap, as everybody else could and it definitely 
should be a shared library. If it had not been, we from KPA would have never 
used it.

All in all, I think I can state that we from KPA definitely would like to 
still use libkgeomap when we start to port it to KF5. So it would be nice if 
it kept on being a "normal" shared library.

Cheers, Tobias