Require Soprano for kdelibs

[Richard Dale]

On Thursday 06 August 2009 11:50:42 am Sune Vuorela wrote:
> On 2009-08-06, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> > --nextPart1846167.YcnjnuxToF
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> > On Thursday 06 August 2009, Volker Krause wrote:
> >> However, experience with that in KDE PIM (eg. cyrus-sasl for various
> >> mail server authentication methods, to name just one example) shows that
> >> this can cause considerable support load since not everyone pays
> >> attention to the CMake output regarding the effects of missing
> >> dependencies. If I can't even rely on distros doing that correctly (most
> >> of them do fortunately), =
> >
> > my
> >
> >> only option to ensure that the majority of our users get a fully working
> >> application is to enforce the dependencies unfortunately :-/
> >
> > and in the case of things like plasma-desktop/plasma-netbook and where
> > the= =20
> > feature sets are going there, there will soon be code in libplasma that
> > all= ows=20
> > those UI shells to coordinate context with the rest of the system via
> > nepom= uk.
>
> I really think that all these things aronud nepomuk sounds really cool,
> and nepomuk is one of the coolest features of kde4.
>
> But effectively for very many users it is still completely unusable.
>
> Too many distributions does not ship the soprano/sesame backend, which
> effectively renders nepomuk unusable for all its cool things.
>
> A solution somehow needs to be found before nepomuk gets too much
> required from users. And I'm not sure the good solution is to force
> distributions to package sesame.
>
> There is many reasons for this, but most of it ends up in the two
> things:
>  - the common set of "java interested people" and "kde interested
>    people" among distribution people is (very close to) the empty set.
>  - java is for many reasons a pain to package as there is effectively no
>    api/abi stability and a lot of embedded precompiled libraries and a
>    lot of embedded code copies.
>
> Basically, try to build the sesame jar from sources (of course without
> downloading random java libraies from the internet - and each of these
> libraries should also be packaged)
>
> By looking at the amount of libraries downloaded during build, I would
> expect at least 2-4 weeks of more than full time work packaging this.
> And it would probably quite quickly be boring and repetitive.
Well Sesame2 and Redland are two complete turkeys as far as being useful for a 
production ready KDE by large numbers of ordinary people. There is no way I 
personally want a hard dependency on Java in KDE4, or be forced to use 
something too slow for the job like Redland. 

Until we have a reliable version of OpenLink Virtuoso that has its packaging 
and SPARQL problems fixed, I don't think we should make Soprano a hard 
dependency.

-- Richard