Help make the KDE Platform modular, instead of complicating each single KDE program

[Gregory Schlomoff]

Hello,

Well, I'd like to jump into this thread to share my use-case towards
making KDE more modular. I've been working for the past 4 weeks to
build a trimmed-down version of the KDE libraries on windows that
would allow me to have most of kdepimlibs available for use by my
program.

After patching a few CMakeLists files, I was able to build kdecore,
kdeui, kio, and most of kdepimlibs, with almost NO dependency (only
Qt, dbus, sqlite, zlib, libxslt, libical, cyrus-sasl, and boost).

In the end, the results are very satisfactory. I've built everything
statically, and linking KIMAP into my app, for example, adds less than
1 Mb to the final executable (with everything built in full debug
mode), with no apparent dependency on the KDE stack. If I had shipped
the shared KDE libraries with my executable, as they are built out of
the box with all the dependencies, it would have added roughly 10 Mb
instead.

I've been talking about that with the guys on #akonadi, and they
encouraged me to post my patches on the review board. I've got to
clean up things a little bit, but I'll definitely share this. It's not
probably a good enough solution yet, because it's very tailored for my
needs, but I hope that at least it serves as a proof of concept and to
show that there is definitely demand for a more modular KDE.

Cheers,

Greg

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 12:34 AM, Anders Lund <anders at alweb.dk> wrote:
> On Onsdag den 6. oktober 2010, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
>> On Wednesday, September 29, 2010 21:37:33 Anders Lund wrote:
>> > Anyways, harddisk space or memory can't be a problem these days. If you
>> > want  to use KDE software, using it with features cut of to save harddisk
>> > space (or memory) is ridiculous!
>>
>> No it's not.
>>
>> Well it is if you only take cheap rotational rust ("harddisk") into
>> account, but size definitely matters for mobile devices, or those that use
>> SSDs.
>>
>> Reducing installed size and dependencies is one side-effect of the
>> modularization effort, since if you want to only ship parts of the
>> platform, inter dependencies have to be reduced, or made optional.
>
> I can appreciate that :)
>
> I'd love to have a KDE driven phone, so i'll go with optional to keep the
> functionality on those old fashioned devices...
>
> --
> Venlig hilsen,
> Anders
>