Baloo Framework - License Exception

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 06 January 2015 14:18:16 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Dimarts, 6 de gener de 2015, a les 13:06:19, David Faure va escriure:
> > On Tuesday 06 January 2015 12:04:02 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > > El Dimarts, 6 de gener de 2015, a les 11:01:19, David Faure va escriure:
> > > > The problem (and the reason I talk about shooting ourselves in the
> > > > foot)
> > > > is
> > > > ... what do we do instead, then, to solve the KDE issue?
> > > > We need to be able to use baloo in both "KDE Workspace" and "KDE
> > > > applications", which are released separately and cannot depend on each
> > > > other.
> > > 
> > > Why not?
> > > 
> > > I'd don't think some "KDE Applications" optionally depending on "Plasma"
> > > to
> > > give higher workspace integration (and optionally depending on other
> > > workspace libs for the same).
> > 
> > I don't see why applications should be tied to the KDE workspace just to
> > benefit from searching features. Surely searching is useful on Windows,
> > Mac OS X, Gnome, etc. as well.
> 
> Yes, and they should integrate with the searching frameworks of those
> desktops, no?

If we're talking about searching for files on the desktop, then yes, possibly 
(although there's no cross-platform API for this, so using baloo might 
actually be simpler, at the expense of more indexing).

If we're talking about other kind of searches, then no.
Apparently this baloo repo isn't needed for KMail (anymore), so that example 
doesn't work anymore, but you see what I mean.

Anyway what you suggest is to make the baloo dependency optional in e.g. 
dolphin so that dolphin can be used on Windows, Mac OSX, and Gnome as well. 
This is what we had with #ifdef HAVE_NEPOMUK and it was a hell to maintain...
It's much simpler to have the baloo API available everywhere, and have it find 
nothing at runtime if there's no file index available. Basically the KDE4 
solution, where baloo was more or less part of kdelibs, and for sure available 
everywhere as an API.

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