Kill KIO (was: Repositioning the KDE brand)

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tuesday 14 July 2009, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Em Terça-feira 14 Julho 2009, às 11:06:06, Pau Garcia i Quiles escreveu:
> > Hello,
> >
> > > Qt-only programs always makes me wonder what is wrong with the KDE
> > > libs, as these are supposed to help for better programs.
> >
> > One of the main hurdles on Windows is DBus. Then there's the awful lot
> > of KDE libraries you need to redistribute: most of what you distribute
> > are KDE libraries and its dependencies, and only a small part is your
> > actual application.
>
> The problem is not the KDE libraries. Using kdecore, kdeui, kpty, kutils,
> etc. is not a problem.

Well, where they simply add bulk and dependencies while not providing 
something over Qt, it's a problem. And, actually, the size _is_ a problem in 
for some target platforms. Even just the size the library files take up on 
disk or in the installer.

> The "problem" is that the KDE libraries expect a KDE runtime environment.
> They will read from sycoca (which may trigger running of kbuildsycoca4),
> they will try and talk to kded, kglobalacceld, klauncher. KIO, in special,
> will ask klauncher to start the ioslaves to do I/O.

Yes, that's a big problem.

> And all of that requires D-Bus.
>
> Qt is a simply a toolkit library, integrating with the platform. KDE, on
> the other hand, *is* the platform, which means its libraries do
> "platform-y" stuff, like launching daemons, collecting information about
> installed plugins, requiring D-Bus. The libraries have their own concept of
> locale and settings, completely separate from the rest of the system even!
>
> The way I see it, there's nothing *wrong* with this picture.

It does mean that a KDE application is not portable to other platforms; if you 
try to do so, you drag the KDE platform with you, and that is undesirable. I 
want Krita or any other app I am working on to be a Windows, an OSX, a Maemo, 
an S60, a KDE application, not an application on of KDE on top of Windows, 
OSX, Maemo, S60, whatever.

KDE is actually very similar to gnustep here: that also claims not to be a 
desktop but a development platform, but the only platform where it is native 
is its own desktop.

So, for my applications, I need to find a way to switch out the KDE libraries 
when porting them to other platforms.

> What could be considered wrong is if there's a nice feature that doesn't
> depend on anything of the "platform-y" stuff. If that's the case, then it
> should be moved upstream through the libraries. (Or the case of features
> that do depend on those things, but for silly reasons, like our locale
> formatting routines requiring KConfig)


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org