kde3 kde4 coinstallability take two

[David Faure]

On Monday 22 October 2007, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Monday 22 of October 2007, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > On Monday 22 October 2007, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > > usr/bin/kstart
> > > > user application to start programs with weird args. Append 4 ?
> > >
> > > I guess not, since there might be user scripts out there that use it by
> > > name.
> > >
> > > First of all, is this runtime material or workspace? I.e., does it work
> > > with other WMs than kwin?
> > >
> > > Most of this application's options are related to the window placement,
> > > so how is it communicating that information to the Window Manager? If
> > > it's native WM hints, then either kstart would work just fine in either
> > > environment.
> > >
> > > If it's using DCOP/D-Bus, then distributions will need to replace this
> > > with a shell script that detects the running environment and execs the
> > > correct one. Meaning: you need to rename the KDE 3 one too.
> >
> > From a quick look at the code I'd say it is using direct X11 communication
> > with the window manager, so it should work with other window managers as
> > well and there is probably no difference for a script if it calls the KDE3
> > or KDE4 version.
> 
>  Correct. However it's a user script and I don't think it belongs to 
> kdebase/runtime. Well, at least it's certainly a hack ugly enough not to be 
> used by other apps.
 
User scripts do belong in a "always installed runtime" package, so that user
scripts do work on any kde installation.
There was an old discussion (mainly between Aaron and me iirc, on this list),
about whether or not to split kdebase/runtime into "runtime for apps" and "runtime
for scripts", but whether it's split out or not, the problem is the same: it must be there,
so it will conflict with the equivalent 'runtime' of earlier kde versions.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).