New dependency for kdelibs and kdebase: dbusmenu-qt

[Ben Cooksley]

2010/4/29 Aurélien Gâteau <agateau at kde.org>:
> On 28/04/2010 23:56, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 9:47 AM, Christoph Feck <christoph at maxiom.de> wrote:
>>> On Wednesday 28 April 2010 22:14:26 Tom Albers wrote:
>>>> That said, let's move on and appreciate the new feature.
>>>
>>> Yeah, like the missing icons on the systray menus (e.g. Konversation). I mean,
>>> I do not really believe that the code has not been tested.
>>
>> This change also severely breaks KNetworkManager ( it is useless now
>> ), I had to use nm-applet to connect to my wireless network yesterday
>> following this ( the Plasmoid didn't work either... )
>
> This is true, but let me add some information about KNetworkManager:
> While working on dbusmenu, KNetworkManager was identified as an
> application which would be broken.
>
> This issue was discussed with Will Stephenson: I initially proposed to
> turn the menu into a dialog showing network connections in a QListView,
> but Will suggested it would be better to work on the networkmanagement
> Plasma applet rather than improving KNetworkManager, which is considered
> to be an interim solution. I remotely participated to the latest Tokamak
> sprint where networkmanagement applet devs worked on getting the applet
> ready.

More testing with the applet found that I had to recreate the account
I had stored in Network Management already for it to work, but it does
function now.

>
> In the end the applet got improved quite a bit, and is usable, at least
> for me, but it's difficult if not impossible to ensure the applet is a
> full 1 to 1 replacement of the monolithic binary because there is a lot
> of different hardware and software configurations, leading to situations
> which are difficult to reproduce and thus to test for developers.
>
> To ensure KNetworkManager was still usable with dbusmenu, I added a
> hackish way to disable dbusmenu in KStatusNotifierItem: it won't export
> the menu on dbus if you set the environment variable "KSNI_NO_DBUSMENU".
> It's a dirty hack, but I felt it would not be a good idea to add a
> proper API for this, as we should encourage developers to use standard
> menu items. Kubuntu Lucid will ship with a one-line patch in
> KNetworkManager which sets this environment variable in main(). I
> haven't proposed it for merging, but I can do it if you feel it's necessary.

Please do it. This will ensure other distributions get it so that
KNetworkManager isn't broken for users when they update to KDE 4.5.
Avoiding breakages to critical ( in the eyes of users anyway ) tools
is a must.

>
> Aurélien
>

Regards,
Ben Cooksley