KDE Applications consistency between KDE4 and Frameworks based applications

[Raymond Wooninck]

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Regards
Raymond
openSUSE KDE Community packager