konq plugins (Re: KParts::TextExtension)

[David Faure]

On Monday 27 September 2010, Dawit A wrote:
> Why ? Would not a simple #if KDE_IS_VERSION(....) suffice in both the
> header and source files of kwebkitpart_ext ?

Yes for kwebkitpart it's easier. But for the babelfish plugin, my patch 
involves
- removing the config check for kwebkitpart.h  (and generated header)
- removing the explicit linking with khtml and kwebkitpart
- in addition to all the code changes.

The first two points are in cmakelists.txt, so not just done with a #if.

> Anyhow, you need not
> worry about this since I have already created a stable branch for
> kwebkitpart already:

Great (tell me when I can commit to kwebkitpart),
but it doesn't solve the problem with the plugins.

In fact, I don't understand why they are in extragear. I mean, yes, the 
initial idea for kdeaddons was "so that they can be optionally installed", but 
nowadays it means "and they have a separate release cycle" which makes no 
sense whatsoever, given that they are tied to konqueror anyway.
Every time someone changes something in kdelibs or konqueror which affects the 
plugins, this same problem arises. Not that we make bin incompat changes,
but just depending on new features (from kdelibs or konq) is a huge issue 
every time.

==> How about we move these plugins to kdebase?
Not all of them - not entirely separate views like fsview, but at least the 
HTML-related plugins, like rellinks, adblock, uachanger, babelfish, validators,
domtreeviewer, khtmlsettingsplugin, searchbar?
They are certainly not essential -- nothing ever is -- but they go together 
with konqueror, really. I actually miss kdeaddons for this; it had the 
advantage of being "not in the core set of packages" while still being tied to 
KDE SC releases, so it didn't have the extragear issue of "I have no idea 
which version of kdelibs I'm being compiled against". Why did we drop 
kdeaddons, again?

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org).