[Kde-pim] Re: Check the version of kdepim-runtime?

[Volker Krause]

On Wednesday 12 January 2011 16:17:59 Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
> Yesterday I discovered kdepim-runtime and that it might have caused many of
> the problems I've had with KMail 2. It was so broken for me that I had to go
> back to KMail 1.
> What do you think about versioning kdepim-runtime (e.g. in the desktop files
> of the agents) and increasing the version number after each major bugfix or
> each bugfix release?
> Then kdepim could check the version at runtime and notify unsuspecting users
> of the problem, instead of failing silently. Other KDE apps also version
> their plugins and have version dependencies.
> 
> We just had an IRC discussion about the issue and I don't buy that there is
> not actually a problem. I don't read the README of everything I use, I
> expect software to tell me in some way if an important dependency is
> missing or outdated. Version numbers are not only for binary compatibility.

So, what is the exact techinical problem we are trying to protect against 
here? Binary or protocol incompatible changes? Or distro/user failure to not 
update kdepim-runtime to a recent version that has new bugfixes? IIUC we are 
mainly talking about the latter one, right?

Versioning agents is probably not a bad idea in general, in case of an 
intentional BC/PC break. However, we are trying very hard to keep backward 
compatibility, so in case of an actual BIC/PIC problem, this would be 
unintentional and thus would likely not include the corresponding version 
number update. Versioning would thus not gain us anything, instead of updating 
the version number once noticed, we would rather fix the incompatibility.

About the "someone forgot to update kdepim-runtime" usecase, this would end up 
being an ugly hack somewhere (I don't even know where, to avoid unecessary 
cross-dependencies between modules) that checks for a minimum version of an 
agent we know for sure to be in kdepim-runtime. We cannot just enforce a 
general minimum version for all agents with each update since agents are 
released outside of kdepim-runtime as well (playground, extragear, even non-
KDE/non-FOSS). Even picking the agent that should be checked is non-trivial, 
if you look at e.g. how the KDE-maintained MeeGo packages split up kdepim-
runtime.

Btw, is there a comparable check regarding kdebase-runtime somewhere? I'd 
guess we have the same problem there.

regards
Volker
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