remove khelpcenter from next Plasma release?

[Luigi Toscano]

On Wednesday 09 of March 2016 15:29:28 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> [For the sake of sanity, please reply to both list, this topic affects
> applications and Plasma.]
> 
> One of the topics we are discussing at the current Plasma sprint is whether
> we really want khelpcenter as part of the Plasma releases in the future.
> Some data points:
> 
> - khelpcenter is unmaintained, it has seen a rough port to KF5, but has
>   otherwise seen zero love, this shows
> - just dropping it would mean that the user gets sent to a webpage
> containing the latest version of the documentation, so khelpcenter's
> usecase is actually just being an offline cache, fallback mechanism are
> already in place 
> - said user documentation is spotty, this is only semi-related, but still 
doesn't exactly make a strong case for keeping it
> - it uses KHTML

There is a non-committed work to have search working again, which will cut the 
bug list. You should have probably already noticed a bunch of commits which 
fixes some language related issues.

Apart from that, I see a continued push to remove support for non-connected 
users. I still think that there is a value in that, but no one seems to agree 
with that.

Moreover, khelpcenter is not just for *our* documentation, but to access also 
other documentation on the system.

> A casual poll among developers here at the sprint reveals that ~70% would
> rather see it gone from Plasma, the rest abstains. Nobody from my
> (admittedly small) sample really wants to keep it.
> 
> Killing it could mean that we remove it entirely (to unmaintained), or if
> anybody is interested in maintaining it making it part of Applications, or
> Extragear.
> 
> Let's seriously think about dropping it from Plasma 5.7 and onwards. If
> anybody is hell-bent on keeping it, this person should consider maintaining
> it as well. Unmaintained code in Plasma is not cool, and so far nobody
> seems to care enough to step up.

That said, I perceive this email as "khelpcenter is not welcome in Plasma", 
probably with a maintainer ("hell-bent on keeping it" sounds very negative to 
me). So not sure what should be the discussion about.

Again, please recheck the recent list of commits.

Ciao
-- 
Luigi