How is KF5 packaged on major systems?

[Shaheed Haque]

Hi all,

I am working on trying to revive PyKDE4 as PyKF5 and more [1]. The procedure is:

1. create SIP file from the relevant KF5 .h file(s)
2. run the SIP compiler to produce the actual binding C++ code
3. compile the binding C++ code
4. link the result into a .so file against the relevant KF5 library .so

The whole point of what I am doing is to automate as much as possible
of steps 1-4, and this question centres on step 4. How can I automate
identifying the correct KF5 library .so file? For example, on my
Ubuntu Wily system, I can start with the header files in
"/usr/include/KF5/KItemModels/*.h" and then I need to link against
"libKF5ItemModels.so".

So, what I need is a reliable way to map from the name of the module,
"KItemModels" to the corresponding library in a distro (and platform?)
independent manner. I have to do this for circa 120 different modules
just for PyKF5. The worst case solution from my thinking would be for
me to hard code the mapping in a way that has to be redone for each
distro/platform.

Later on, I expect to need to do the equivalent for step 1, i.e. find
the .h files. So perhaps a joined up solution based around CMake might
make sense...but I'm pretty much a noob as far as CMake is concerned
and so I'm not sure what is possible.

Recommendations?

Thanks, Shaheed

[1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-bindings/2016-March/008240.html