KActivities repository split

[Ivan Čukić]

Hi everyone,

As previously announced, KActivities has been split into a few
separate repositories. This mail is mostly intended to notify our dear
packagers of the change, and the plan for the transition period.

KActivities framework 5.19 (as released a few days ago) contains
everything that it used to, this is about the next version - 5.20.

This is the former setup:
----------------------------------

Everything was contained in kde:kactivities, and distributions used to
split it into different packages.


This is the setup now:
-------------------------------

- kde:kactivities - contains the framework and QML includes, it will
soon become a tier1 integration framework
- kde:kactivitymanagerd - contains the activities service and its plugins
- kde:kactivities-stats - the (first-to-be-released-with-5.20)
framework for getting the usage statistics collected by the activities
service

- KIO module from kde:kactivities will be moved to kio-extras
- KCM module will be moved to plasma-desktop/kcms
- fileitem plugin will also need a new home (any ideas?)


The release schedules:
---------------------------------

kde:kactivities and kde:kactivities-stats will follow kde frameworks
release schedule, other components will follow Plasma's release
schedule.

How to handle this transition is explained below.


Dependencies:
---------------------

- kde:kactivities has a optional runtime, but *strongly* recommended
dependency on kde:kactivitymanagerd (on Plasma distributions)
- kde:kactivities-stats is not used by anyone at the moment (plasma
has had an internal copy with a different soname for some time now,
and it will keep that internal copy until plasma 5.7). Plasma 5.7 will
depend on kactivities and kactivities-stats.


The transition period:
-----------------------------

The situation with kde:kactivitymanagerd is clear, when making 5.20
packages of kde:kactivities, please make the kde:kactivitymanagerd
package to be a hard requirement (alternatively, make plasma-workspace
require kde:kactivitymanagerd, and make it to be just an optional
dependency for kde:kactivities).

The potential problem is with the additional modules like KCM, KIO and
the FileItem plugin for Dolphin. If the user updates to kf5.20 before
updating to plasma 5.6 (which will be released after kf5.20, but will
not depend on kf5.20) these components will be missing, along with the
features they provide.

Therefore, as a one-off, we are going to release kcm+kio+fileitem
plugin as a tarball called kactivities-workspace-5.5 (alternatively,
is is also available as a git repository at
kde:scratch/ivan/kactivities-workspace).

We will also release kactivitymanagerd 5.5 before kf5.20 so that a
package can be created on time for the update.

To recap, we are going to make these two releases out of schedule:
- kactivitymanagerd-5.5 that will contain the activities service
needed for the upgrade to kf5.20
- kactivities-workspace-5.5 that will contain workspace plugins (KIO,
KCM, FileItem) for the period between the upgrade to kf5.20 and
upgrade to plasma 5.6.

Cheerio,
Ivan

--
KDE, ivan.cukic at kde.org, http://cukic.co/
gpg key id: 850B6F76