overhaul of some kcm appearance

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:09:15PM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Saturday 14 March 2009, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> > because as is, from a random non-plasma application's perspective, the
> > lib is more or less "librandomstuff" with very little useful features
> 
> a "plasma application" is any app that uses libplasma. so yes, if you don't 
> have a need for the things in libplasma, then it's not useful to you. but 
> that's a tautology, isn't it?
> 
nice way to twist things around.
i thought a "plasma application" would be something remotely
plasma-related, from a user perspective.

> apps that don't have a gui won't find anything useful in libkdeui. same thing.
> 
this analogy simply doesn't hold. you'll find hardly any kde gui app that
does not use a whole lot from kdeui. or any other of the frameworks it
decides to use. this simply isn't the case with libplasma when it is
used outside the original target context. that's because libplasma is
not a general-purpose library assembled from many sources, but a
collection of tools developed specifically for the needs of plasma. 

> what i'm wondering is what, exactly, you're trying to achieve with your 
> comments here? if you could help me understand what you're trying to achieve, 
> then maybe we can find some common ground in that direction. otherwise this is 
> a waste of our time.
> 
i'm expecting at least an understanding of the problem on your side, and
broader attention to the issue - with the slight hope that the mistake
will not be repeated.
as a short-term improvement one might consider refactoring classes from
libplasma into other libraries and make the plasma libs thin delegates.
but that's obviously ugly.

have you ever wondered why kde is an island beyond those apps which go
full monty, while gnome core technologies are more or less silently
penetrating not only the desktop (including kde), but the entire free
software market? i mean, apart from the obvious "it's c++"? yes, it's
badly structured monster libraries with oodles of dependencies. almost
*every* c++ (and even qt) developer to whom i suggest to use kde
libraries comes up with this argument.
just as a random data point, kinda ironically we (trolls) are right now
facing the same situation with some random nokia-internal potential user
group.