Require Soprano for kdelibs

[Volker Krause]

On Thursday 06 August 2009 17:49:28 Richard Dale wrote:
> 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.

well, that's a chicken and egg problem then. I don't disagree that the current 
situation is sub-optimal and I'd rather not force it on someone, but I don't 
think anything will improve there without increasing the pain level either, 
at least I didn't see any real changes with the current setup...

regards
Volker
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