KDE Platform Profiles

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday 12 April 2010, Kevin Ottens wrote:
> Gooooood (not-so-)morning(-anymore) kde-core-devel!
...
> === Action Plan ===
> * We need to communicate with packagers in order to see more fine grained
> packages built, at least for the non-desktop variant of distros. That might
> even reach out to desktop distros, which is maybe a good thing, but that's
> not our main focus. kde-packager got already contacted by Frederik
> (although I didn't see any feedback coming from this list yet).
>
> * We propose adding a CMake variable to choose the platform profile.
> KDE_PLATFORM_PROFILE would be one of Desktop, Tablet, Mobile. We already
> have a first proof of concept patch for that under Alexander's review,
> subject to changes. Note that said variable is a high level one setting
> defaults for the low level variables used within out libs (e.g. if
> KDE_PLATFORM_PROFILE=Mobile then in libplasma we'd set a
> "PLASMA_NO_KDEWEBKIT" variable to true which would be used to avoid the
> kdewebkit dependency).
>
> * Applying dependency reduction in code is possible with the platform
> profile.

Beside the effort to this working an implemented, it will also be hard to 
actually *keep* the different configuratios working.

I think if we really want to do this, at this point we finally really do need 
automatic builds for all our supported platforms in the supported 
configurations.

I am currently setting up Nightly builds for complete KDE on 
http://my.cdash.org. You can go there, get a login and search for the 
KDE-related projects (named like the svn modules), e.g. here is the current 
result for kdelibs: http://my.cdash.org/index.php?project=kdelibs

As you can see, still right now it is hard for us to keep our dependencies 
working, just yesterday Apaku committed a fix because strigi or nepomuk or 
SDO was optional somewhere and relied upon somewhere else. I would assume 
this will become much more frequent if we have such different configurations.

I started writing up how to run and use such dashboards for KDE at techbase: 
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/CMake/DashboardBuilds

It may still need some improvements, but the main part should be already 
working now. So if you're interested, let me know.
The main thing about contributing nightly builds is having a machine which is 
reliably running *every* day, and also reliably have the time to keep the 
nightly build working (when dependencies change etc.).

Alex