[Digikam-users] Are all these processes left behind digikam's fault or KDE's?

[Chris G]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 09:48:03AM +0100, Jakob Østergaard wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 November 2007, Chris G wrote:
> ...
> >     chris     7751     1  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:00 kdeinit
> > Running... chris     7754     1  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:00 dcopserver
> > --nosid --suicide chris     7756  7751  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:00
> > klauncher [kdeinit] chris     7758     1  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:01
> > kded
> >     chris    16652  7751  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:00 kio_file
> > [kdeinit] file chris    16706     1  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:01
> > kio_uiserver chris    19220     1  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:00 knotify
> > [kdeinit] chris    19223     1  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:02 khelpcenter
> > help:/digikam?anchor=resizetool.anchor chris    25536  7751  0 15:16
> > ?        00:00:00 kio_help [kdeinit] help chris    25537  7751  0
> > 15:16 ?        00:00:00 kio_help [kdeinit] help
> 
> Just parts of the KDE environment - the things that make the entire 
> desktop with all its applications work as a smoothly integrated well 
> oiled machine.
> 
> You'll find that these parts take up virtually no resources at all; it's 
> a few handfulls of megabytes, probably most of which is demand paged 
> from disk anyway - compared to any modern browser or e-mail reader, the 
> overhead of the processes you mention is negligible.
> 
> I bet you hadn't noticed them if you hadn't run ps  :)
> 
Ah, but I ran ps to see where my digikam help had gone, it was some
'infelicity' in the KDE environment that lost my digikam help.


> > I don't run KDE, I run fvwm as my desktop,
> 
> KDE is a desktop environment.
> 
> fvwm is a window manager.
> 
> Those two are very different systems. A window manager is part of a 
> desktop environment (KDE uses kwin per default - you could change that 
> if you wanted to), but it is not a desktop environment (at least not in 
> the same sense as KDE - I know that one could always argue that these 
> are just different shades of grey).
> 
Yes, I realise the differences, since I'm running a Fedora 7
installation I have a mostly gnome environment, I even run the
gnome-panel on my fvwm desktop sometimes.  I have the KDE libraries
installed because of the occasional KDE application I want to run, at
the moment I think digikam is the only one.


> > should digikam/KDE really 
> > leave all this junk behind when I exit?
> 
> I bet they are left behind because other KDE apps would need them 
> anyway, so it's faster to leave them spawned and idle than to 
> exit/start them.
> 
... but I don't run any other KDE apps.  :-)


> So, despite the fact that it may look wasteful to have a few processes 
> sitting idle on your system, it may well be the most efficient thing to 
> do.
> 
> > Anyway it probably explains 
> > why I couldn't get the digikam help, it thinks it's already there.
> 
> This sounds unlikely in my ears.
> 
Well I certainly got my digikam help back when I stopped all the KDE
stuff and then restarted digikam.  I suspect that khelpcenter that was
running fooled digikam into thinking it was already visible, which it
wasn't.

I'm not so worried by the resources which all the KDE bits and pieces
take up as the likelihood that they will cause problems like the one I
saw where an application *thought* it had displayed its help but
hadn't really done so.

Whatever, it's not really digikam's problem, it's KDE's.  Though it
does worry me slightly how applications (not just digikam) become *so*
dependent on a particular environment that they won't work in any
other.  Digikam does pretty well, I didn't even realise it was a KDE
application for a while (well, its name doesn't start with k does
it!), this problem with its help is the only significant one I have
seen.

-- 
Chris Green