RFC: On-demand package installation API in kdelibs

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 28 of July 2010, Martin Sandsmark wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 July 2010 17:58:57 Lubos Lunak wrote:
> > - Amarok will complain about MP3 support not being present (which is the
> > case by default with some distributions because of legal reasons) and will
> > try running a specific script to install it
>
> Won't this move liability over to KDE?
> Helping/asking people to break various laws (DMCA in the case of libdvdcss,
> patent laws, etc.) is not something I want to do. :-)

 I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell for sure (and Amarok already has support 
for it now, just not as a generic KDE functionality).

 I think KDE should not be responsible, because this should not work on its 
own, without the packager helping it a bit. If Amarok finds out it cannot 
play mp3, it would just do 'installCapability( "amarok-mp3" )' and that'd be 
it, it would be just saying there is something missing, but vanilla KDE 
wouldn't do anything about it. It would be up to the code provided by the 
packager to make this call actually install something. Even if there would be 
one day a generic upstream code to install a package, it would be up to the 
packager to provide a package that provides "amarok-mp3".

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer
 l.lunak at suse.cz , l.lunak at kde.org