KDiagram libs (KChart, KGantt) in KDE Review

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

Calligra, Massif-Visualizer, KMyMoney (and perhaps more) make use of KDAB's 
nice offer of their KDChart in the GPLv2 licensing variant. But as there are 
no real public releases of KDChart, all the projects have copied a dump of 
KDChart into their code repositories, updating now and then to newer versions 
of KDChart. Which is anything but perfect.

To improve things, after some talk with KDABians it was decided to create a 
KDE repo with a KDE-fied fork of KDChart, based on their latest Qt5ied 
version. So all FLOSS Qt5-based projects have a single place to-go-to for nice 
charting. Which would be centrally updated now and then. Still not perfect, 
but an improvement over the current situation.
To meet the KDE repo requirements, KDAB has also extended the license to 
GPLv2+ for this dump :)

That repo is named "kdiagram" and has just been moved into "kdereview".
Final destination is "extragear/graphics", as other charting/diagram software 
also is located there.

After the initial code dump in the repo, work has been done to convert the 
buildsystem from qmake to cmake/ECM and KDE-fy the code in general. But no 
real changes besides renaming/rebranding have been done to the codebase, so 
this should be quickly usable by all FLOSS programs with their own copy of 
KDChart so far, and just need a few s/KDChart/KChart/ etc. for adaption.

KDChart actually consists of two libraries, "kdchart" and "kdgantt", which 
have been made explicitly separate libs in KDiagram, and named "kchart" and 
"kgantt" there (and thus the repo "kdiagram" instead of "kchart", to not hide 
the gantt lib). Not yet clear if those libs would be merged more one day, so 
for now staying with a single repo, like the original, instead of splitting up 
into two repos by the two libs.

Ideally a first release of kdiagram (libs kchart, kgantt) is done before the 
porting work of Calligra to Qt5 starts somewhen end of February, so that port 
can rely on the then external libs from the start. For that the schedule now 
is:

tagging first release: February 16th
moving to "Extragear/Graphics": February 22th
release first release: February 22th

Please do a
	git clone kde:kdiagram
and give the libs some build testing (also go for all the compiled example and 
test apps) and review, especially the buildsystem. And perhaps prepare your 
FLOSS apps to use it already. This should give you KChart resp. KGantt in your 
CMakeLists.txt file:

	find_package(KChart "2.6.0" REQUIRED)
	target_link_libraries(myflossapp KChart)

	find_package(KGantt "2.6.0" REQUIRED)
	target_link_libraries(myflossapp KGantt)

Cheers
Friedrich