Modular building of kde modules

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Thursday 19 March 2009, Maciej Mrozowski wrote:
> On Thursday 19 of March 2009 22:49:13 Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > On Thursday 19 March 2009, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 18 of March 2009, Parker Coates wrote:
> > > > For example, my app Killbots is quite happy to be built as part of
> > > > the KDEGames module. But to build it as a standalone app would
> > > > require adding some setup and dependency checks to the CMake file.
> > > > These are normally performed by the module level CMake file, so
> > > > blindly including them in my app would lead to double checks the
> > > > majority of the time.
> > >
> > >  I am not a cmake expert, but I thought results of checks were cached,
> > > so repeating them shouldn't matter?
> >
> > That's correct. But it leads to more cmake script code in our
> > repositories (i.e. it would look more crowded/complicated).
>
> Besides it's not possible to really build everything separately (for now)
> due to following reasons:
>
> - some modules rely on relative include paths or just assume that whole
> toplevel directory (like kdebase/workspace) is present and available. This
> is due to fact, that some library include files reused by many modules are
> not installed. The notable example is libkdepim - it's added to includedirs
> in toplevel CMakeLists.txt, so it just needs to be present while building
> any other kdepim module, even when libkdepim is actually installed in
> system. There are some other examples like recently added
> screenpreviewwidget to libs/kworkspace (reused by kwin, but
> screenpreviewwidget.h is not installed along libkworkspace), some files
> from libkonq needed by dolphin and konqueror to be build
> (konq_copytomenu.h, konq_popupmenuinformation.h) and many more (I could
> provide a list if anyone is interested).

Yes, applications which use libs from the own module need more work.

> - some modules need to compile sth from the other modules (like some

I think now we are getting in trouble with terminology.
You mean "directories" inside the modules, not "modules", right ?

> - some modules possibly would have circular build dependencies if built
> really separately (again kdepim: kresources<->akonadi)

I didn't check, but that shouldn't be the case. If it was, I think we would 
have a problem already right now ?

> - some modules just for now cannot be built separately, as they all are
> part of one export unit (KDE4Workspace). Actually they can be built

Two issues here:
-finding the right "granularity" for these files (I'd like to make kdelibs at 
least partially separately installable)
-do we really want to support installing each library separately, e.g. from 
kdebase/workspace ? (I don't think so)

Alex