[KDE/Mac] Thoughts on standard directories in Qt5 - QStandardPaths

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Monday January 05 2015 11:18:23 Mario Fux wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 04. Januar 2015, 22.22:09 schrieb René J.V. Bertin:

Hi Mario,

> KF5 stands for "KDE Frameworks 5". "KDE" stands for "KDE". Back in the days it 
> stood for "K Desktop Environment" but that's long gone. "KDE" is the community 
> we're all part of. The people. A community that produces a lot of great 
> software.
> So you make the separation of KDE Desktop (aka Plasma) and other KDE Apps 
> yourself?!?

Well, yes. But I consider that even without Plasma, KDE apps (some of which are from kde4-workspace) form an ensemble that one could think of as the KDE Desktop for <some OS>. If you want to call that simply "the KDE apps", well, I guess I can live with that.

> > > "workspace"), and a set of applications. And you can use either of these
> > > independently from the others, that's the whole point of the separation.
> > 
> > Really? You can run any among those applications without the "frameworks"
> > being present? O:-)
> 
> No. That's not what David explained. He meant the you don't need the desktop 
> aka KDE Workspace aka Plasma present.

Well, it is what he said, but I understood what he meant ;)

About Workspace: there are a number of things we use on OS X from kde4-workspace, and from what I understand, other things (like DrKonqi) have been moved into KF5 Workspace which apparently depends intimately on Plasma. This may have to be re-evaluated. We'll want systemsettings on OS X, and of course DrKonqi (esp. after all the effort Ian put into that), and also styles/themes.

> > Like it or not, I think many people (including me) will continue to think
> > of KF5 as KDE 5. If not only KDE just sounds better than KF5...
> 
> Then keep doing so but it's wrong. It's simply wrong. It's not about having an 
> opinion here. The meaning of "KDE" and the KDE Community changed a lot in the 

If KDE no longer refers to Desktop Environment, than what's wrong with calling KF5 KDE 5? The fact that so many Linux distribs already have kde5libs etc. packages?

> I don't really get it and seems to be based on the same wrong assumptions as 
> above.

We do appear to be on parallel channels. My assumption is simple: if KF5 libraries provide additional features, Qt5 applications may decide to use those, or make them optional, for whatever reason. In the latter case, they'll be supporting different configurations. It may be that it's less of a dual situation, but in the end it remains a choice of the application developers.

> We tried hard to invite KDE people from all platforms to participate in what 
> is KF5 now and if there is or was no feedback it was really hard to integrate 
> it. But that's not to blame you. But in the same way it's not to blame the KF5 
> people that they didn't listen or search for guidance and feedback from other 
> platforms if there was none.

I'm not saying there was no such invitation even less that KDE/Mac was excluded deliberately. Depending on how long ago this all happened the KDE Mac community was maybe so small and inactive that they simply missed the invite, or thought they had too little to contribute.
But in the end there was little or no feedback, and I think very few "core KDE devs" looked into OS X adaptations that were floating around to get their own idea of the platforms idiosyncrasies. 

> Just to be clear and that I understand it correctly. KDE apps based on 
> kdelibs4 didn't work correctly and you patched it, right? Do the Qt5/KF5based 
> apps have the same problem? And do just Qt4-based apps (without deps to 
> kdelibs4) have the problem too?

Certain issues like the menu placement are likely to pop up in pure Qt applications too if for instance they define multiple Configure or Settings or Preferences menu actions, without taking care the right one gets created first. Apparently this doesn't happen very often.
OTOH, pure Qt applications that are tested on OS X by their devs or whose devs take feedback from OS X users in account are likely to have been patched themselves. This is also the case with certain KDE apps, but IMHO it shouldn't be necessary.
At the moment we can say very little about Qt5/KF5 in this aspect. Apart from the fact that the menu placement heuristic is in fact expanded with more guesses (now including cut,copy,paste), so that particular issue will continue to exist.

> I think it will never happen that Qt knows if the application it's running 
> currently used KF5 libs as well.

We'll see to what extent that may turn out to be the only solution to yet-to-be-identified issues on OS X ...

Cheers,
R.