[kde-linux] KF5 TimeZone problem

[John Layt]

On 5 April 2016 at 19:06, James Tyrer <jrtyrer at earthlink.net> wrote:
> When I start the KDE4 desktop with available applications replaced with KF5
> ones (including KDE PIM), I get this error box [attached].
>
> I see discussion about this on the web but no real conclusion of what the
> problem is or how to fix it.
>
...
>
> This workaround solves the problem, but it doesn't fix it.  I have been
> unable to determine what the actual problem is.  Any theories?

In KDE4 and earlier, kdelibs had it's own KTimeZone, KDateTime, and
KLocale classes to handle all things related to date and time. The
ktimezoned daemon was a desktop service that provided access to the
system time zone database and notified apps of any change in time zone
or updates to the database. With KF5 these were all dropped and the Qt
versions are used instead, that is QTimeZone, QDateTime and QLocale.
This makes the KF5 requirements lighter and cross-platform, especially
removing the need to have a daemon running just to get the current
time zone which was overkill when the tz or database change so
infrequently.

The problem that you've hit is that ktimezoned was part of Plasma
workspace, so was removed totally in Plasma 5, and you can't
co-install 4 and 5 just to get ktimezoned. What probably needs to
happen is for someone to package just ktimezoned on its own as a
dependency for KAlarm4, although launching it may be an issue. Longer
term this will be fixed by the KAlarm5 port to KF5, but all the PIM
apps are behind schedule due to having so few people working on them.

John.