[Kde-pim] Cyclic link dependencies in kdepimlibs - how to resolve?

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Tuesday 05 May 2009, Thomas McGuire wrote:
> Hi,
>
> now that KPIMTextEdit is basically complete, I wanted to support
> images in signatures.
> The signature editor is in kpimidentities, so kpimidentities needs to
> link to kpimtextedit so that the signature editor there can support
> images.
>
> Problem is, kpimtextedit already links to kpimidentities, because it
> has some functions to insert signatures into the text edit.

Why do those functions exist in kpimtextedit? Wouldn't it be sufficient 
to have a method insertSignature() which is called by somebody (e.g. 
KMail) who can link against both libraries?


> So there is a link cycle between kpimtextedit and kpimidentities, and
> CMake won't let me do that.
>
> Any idea how to resolve that? One idea would be to move all of
> kpimtextedit (two classes at the moment) to kpimidentities and get
> rid of the kpimtextedit library altogether.
> The downside of this is that a text edit doesn't really fit there.

Exactly.


> Does anybody see a better way out of this situation?
> If not I'll move the classes soon.

I object. Creating yet another libkdepim or libkpimutils (*sigh*) is a 
no-go. Putting everything and the kitchensink in one library is no 
solution for bugs in the class and/or library design. The solution is 
to fix the design.

One solution would be to split kpimidentities into a backend library 
kpimidentities-core (ideally using only non-GUI libraries) providing 
access to the PIM identities and a second library kpimidentities-ui 
providing the UI components for editting the PIM identities. I suppose 
this would allow kpimtextedit to link against kpimidentities-core and 
kpimidentities-ui to link against kpimtextedit. (The names of the 
libraries are just suggestions.)

A similar solution, but with the benefit that it doesn't increase the 
number of libraries, would be to merge kpimidentities-ui and 
kpimtextedit into kpimui. Then kpimidentities-core could keep the name 
kpimidentities. I think I prefer this solution.


Regards,
Ingo
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