"get hot new stuff" button

[Martijn Klingens]

On Saturday 22 June 2002 18:06, Simon Hausmann wrote:
> > Hmm, that *could* be done, but I think it's a bit clumsy to have such a
> > hybrid of .so files installed in two different paths. Not to mention that
> > the API .so doesn't really belong in a general library path, because it's
> > only plugins that use it. Then better add the plugin path to
> > LD_LIBRARY_PATH just before loading the viz plugin so the API is picked
> > up automatically.
>
> Why is it clusmy? It is in no way different that say having
> libkonq in $libdir. As soon as you have a library that other
> libraries or binaries link against you should put it into $libdir.

But a plugin that extends another plugin also links against it, no? Such rules 
cannot always hold anyway. If you want that I would like to see *all* plugins 
be installed in $libdir again just to cover the case where another plugin 
extends a plugin. Having two separate paths that can both contain shared libs 
is ugly, it's inconsistent.

> > Also, if app X is installed in a prefix != the KDE prefix you not only
> > need to add the prefix to KDEDIRS (which I already dislike - the app's
> > install prefix should AFAICS be added to KDEDIRS on startup and not
> > require fiddling with environment variables to be user friendly, but
> > that's another issue), but you also need to add the prefix to the library
> > path in order to have the linked .so files be found. Again a pain to
> > administer and if you ask me a needless pain. It's bound to cause bug
> > reports because people are not aware of it.
>
> Because it requires more work either way (think of $PATH)
> administrators re-use existing prefixes (or use stow) . At least
> lazy ones :)

Well, people tend to use the KDE rpms/debs/tgzs that came with their distro, 
but put self-compiled stuff in e.g. /usr/local. It's a bit strange that 
Kopete builds perfectly with --prefix /usr/local/kopete and KDE somewhere 
else, but only at runtime icons are missing and the plugin list is empty.

Also, if you install applications other than through your distro's package 
manager it's a pain to see which file on your system belongs to what 
application. If separate prefixes for each KDE app would work (they don't 
without serious effort, which I consider wrong) it would be easy to see which 
file came from what app.

Martijn