Recommending /usr to distributions for KDE4

[Waldo Bastian]

On Wednesday 18 August 2004 15:22, David Faure wrote:
> This is what $KDEHOME solves: you can have a different .kde dir for your
> various KDE versions.
>
> But we're going away from the topic imho; this isn't about where we
> developers install unstable versions of KDE, it's about where distributions
> install KDE. Having the same prefix, e.g. /usr, in all distros, certainly
> makes the job easier for 3rd-party kde apps who want to provide binary
> packages. The same binary package can work on many distros, provided they
> all use the same paths for KDE stuff. And versioning the dirs can probably
> solve problems indeed, e.g. /usr/share/kde4/services/ for kde4-based
> components....

To wrap this discussion up and include some of the findings from discussion on 
irc:

/usr does indeed seem the way to go for distributions. It does introduce some 
issues that need addressing though:

1) With a distributor provided KDE in /usr it will be more difficult to 
build/use a development version of KDE in parallel (using the _same_ major 
version) since the old KDE version will remain part of $PATH and the include 
path of the compiler. Is it actually possible to build development versions 
right now on e.g. RedHat or do you need to uninstall RedHat's KDE first?

2) For backwards compatibility it is essential to run KDE applications from 
two different KDE major versions in parallel. For that to work all 
information related to plugins, parts and other things that depend on the 
major version of the running KDE application should be stored in versioned 
directories. So share/services should probably become share/kde4/services.
More difficult is parts information that is currently stored in 
application .desktop files under share/applnk and share/applications. (e.g. 
stuff like X-KDE-Library) that should all be moved out of these 
Application .desktop files and moved to versioned Service .desktop files.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
bastian at kde.org  |   KDE Community World Summit 2004  |  bastian at suse.com
bastian at kde.org  | 21-29 August, Ludwigsburg, Germany |  bastian at suse.com
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