[Kde-pim] Plugin Question re Kontact Headers

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Saturday 05 September 2009, Dr. Robert Marmorstein wrote:
> On Saturday 05 September 2009, Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> > I'm having a go at writing a Kontact plugin as per the Tutorial at:
> >
> > 
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Writing_kontact_plugins
> >
> > The second part of the tutorial (Kontact integration) references
> > class Kontact::Plugin which I presume is defined in
> > <kontactinterfaces/plugin.h>
> >
> > I'm developing on Kubuntu (Karmac Alpha 5) and have kdepim-dev and
> > libkontactinterfaces4 installed, but there is no include directory
> > kontactinterfaces.
> >
> >
> > I guessing the following, that kontactinterfaces includes are only
> > part of the kdepim source and aren't installed as part of
> > kdepim-dev. Would this be correct? if so, can I just install kdepim
> > source and use it for building plugins without actually building
> > kdepim?
>
> I was able to write a Kontact plugin for basKet without installing
> kdepim sources.  However, we already had a "kontactinterfaces"
> directory in our source tree.  Perhaps we just copied it over?  If
> so, you could probably do the same, it works fine for us....

It does not really work. It did work as long as your copy of 
kontactinterfaces was identical to the one in kdepim. Now the problem 
is that we, the KDE PIM developers have a track record for making 
incompatible changes to kontactinterfaces and thus breaking the basKet 
Kontact plugin. It was broken with almost every minor KDE update of the 
KDE 3 series.


> Disclaimer: I have a vague recollection that at least one KDE dev
> has told me that the way we're doing things is broken.  I think there
> was no solution for the time being, however.

Yes, that way is broken. See above. A possible solution for this would 
be to make kontactinterfaces public API. But we do not want to do so. 
Just recently there was a short discussion about Kontact plugins and we 
decided not to support the development of arbitrary Kontact plugins by 
making the plugin interfaces public. Unfortunately, I cannot remember 
in which thread this was discussed.

The bottom line is that the development of Kontact plugins is restricted 
to kdepim. So if you want to develop a Kontact plugin then you should 
do so in kdepim.


Regards,
Ingo
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