Why is plasma-framework using /usr/share/kde5?

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 15 April 2014 18:14:36 Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm wondering why Plasma Framework installs it's .desktop files to
> /usr/share/kde5 by default? It causes some confusion for packagers:
> 
> No other framework is using a namespace in /usr/share, they all install into
> /usr/share/$FrameworkName. 

I don't see that here.

$ find /d/kde/inst/kde_frameworks -name services   
/d/kde/inst/kde_frameworks/share/plasma/services
/d/kde/inst/kde_frameworks/share/kde5/services
/d/kde/inst/kde_frameworks/share/dbus-1/services
/d/kde/inst/kde_frameworks/share/konqsidebartng/virtual_folders/services

The first one, plasma/services, only has some *.operations files.

The second one, share/kde5/services/, has all the Type=Service .desktop files 
from many places (khtml, plasma, kate, baloo, kdevelop, kcm....).

So this seems consistent to me (unlike your description).

This needs to be a single directory, it can't be /usr/share/plasma because 
kbuildsycoca5 needs to find all service .desktop files. It's a global database 
of plugins/services, we can't spread it out.

> So why does Plasma framework? And if it has to
> use namespace (but please explain me why), then it should be
> /usr/share/kf5, not /usr/share/kde5, same as we have /usr/include/KF5 and
> not /usr/include/KDE5.

We can rename kde5 to kf5. It was actually suggested in the past.
It's just a bit weird though: /usr/include/KF5 is actually provided by KF5,
while here we're talking about plugins provided by the applications.
The naming kde5 is historic indeed, but the naming kf5 is arguable.

Re Alex Merry's suggestion, at least kde5 or kf5 has a '5' in the name, 
providing co-installability with version 6 :-).
That argument would lead to "kservice5", I guess. But not all files in there 
are related to kservice - e.g. *.protocol files, which are for kio, or 
ServiceMenus which are for dolphin.

IMHO the naming doesn't matter that much, as long as kbuildsycoca5 can find 
the files.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE, in particular KDE Frameworks 5