KDE applications need kfmclient to open links, which is not shipped with kdebase/runtime

[Armin Berres]

Heyya!

After reading the following Debian bug report [0] Pino Toscano and me
discovered the following: To be able to open links most KDE applications
rely on an installed available kfmclient executable [1]. The problem is
now: kfmclient is shipped with Konqueror. This means: If Konqueror is
not installed a lot of applications are not able to open links even with
another configured browser. For KDE user this isn't such a big problem,
but a Gnome user e.g. doesn't want to install Konqueror just to be able
to open external links.
The question is now: How can we solve this problem? I guess in theory
kfmclient should be a part of kdebase/runtime and not kdebase/apps, but
I don't know if this is feasible in pratice. I didn't check yet how
coupled kfmclient and Konqueror are and when distributed -runtime
and -apps are two different tarballs.

Anyway this problem really must be addressed somehow soon.

Greetings,
Armin


[0] http://bugs.debian.org/506125
[1] See kdelibs/kdecore/kernel/ktoolinvocation.cpp for KDE 4 or
kdelibs/kdecore/kapplication.cpp for KDE 3.
KToolInvocation::invokeBrowser(...) respectively
KApplication::invokeBrowser(...) both execute
"startServiceByDesktopName("kfmclient", url, &error, 0, 0, startup_id, false)"
which fails for sure when kfmclient is not around.