Not possible to disable holidays anymore?

Fri Jun 28 16:49:58 BST 2013

Nikos Chantziaras posted on Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:15:35 +0300 as excerpted:

> With KDE 4.10.80 and 4.10.90, I've run into a bug where it's apparently
> not possible to disable the display of holidays in the panel's digital
> clock (when you click on it on order to get a calendar.)  This is quite
> annoying, since now I'm actually getting USA-specific holidays
> displayed.  I'm not American, and neither do I live in the US.
> 
> I filed a bug for this a while ago:
> 
>    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321459
> 
> but no one seems able to confirm.  So I'm wondering whether it's
> something in my system that breaks this.  Is anyone here running 4.10.80
> or 4.10.90 (beta 1 or beta 2), and if yes, are you able to disable the
> display of holidays in the digital clock?

There's a semi-answer at the bottom, but it takes some background to get 
there....

I tried to run 4.10.80 but due to a bug reverted to the 4.10-live-branch 
builds (which gentoo calls 4.10.49.9999) I had been running previously, 
when for some reason, 4.10.80 refused to use configured plasma activities 
and always started with a brand new one, without the old ones shown in 
the switcher.

I have 4.10.90 just installed, but haven't restarted kde yet, so I don't 
know what its status is.

Meanwhile, however, I /do/ have at least /some/ info on the holiday 
thing.  It seems that with 4.11 (starting with its betas), gentoo/kde 
decided to force the semantic-desktop on now, that had previously always 
been a gentoo USE flag controlled build-time option.

Well, I spent quite some time getting semantic-desktop OFF my system and 
I'm not ABOUT to let it get back ON my system, just because the gentoo/kde 
devs think it's no longer a worthwhile option to support. Unlike the 
whole kde3 to kde4 fiasco, THIS time I'm not so much dependent on kde any 
longer as over the course of kde4 I've dropped first one kde app and then 
another as they jumped the shark.  And while I still use and enjoy the 
core kde desktop enough to find it worth running the betas and live-
branch builds, if it comes down to a choice between the rest of kde off 
my system and semantic-desktop in ordered to keep what remains of kde 
around... semantic desktop's NOT going back on my system!  Tho I hope it 
doesn't come to that.

So using the diffs between the 4.10 ebuilds and the 4.11 ebuilds as a 
guide, I created patches to revert all the gentoo/kde semantic-desktop no 
dependency-required stuff, along with a framework that automatically 
applies these patches to new ebuilds when they're pulled in as I update 
from the main gentoo repo and the gentoo/kde overlay.  (For gentooers who 
may be reading, it's basically the same general idea as epatch_user, but 
applied to the ebuild scripts themselves, not to the source tarballs, 
from a new patches tree in /etc/portage/patches.ebuild/ , as opposed to 
the epatch_user patches tree in /etc/portage/patches/ .)  But this is the 
deepest patching to a not-too-small set of packages I've done yet, and 
I'm honestly not at all sure that I'll be able to maintain the patches 
over time myself, if gentoo/kde doesn't decide to reverse course.  I 
think I may end up starting a semanticless-kde4 overlay, similar to the 
user-based kde-sunset overlay that still maintains gentoo's old kde3 
packages in a semi-usable state, if there's enough interest in it once 
4.11 release occurs and more gentoo users who previously chose 
semanticless  have to deal with the problem.  That remains to be seen. 

Alternatively, hopefully kde5-frameworks will come along pretty quickly, 
with its modular design which will I'm hoping break the close dependency 
relationship between kde and semantic desktop, as at least it's certainly 
being sold as more modular and allowing the user more choices of that 
nature.

Or... as I said, I may well be looking for another desktop environment to 
call home for the next dozen years or so, which is about what kde has 
lasted me.

But how does all this apply to your question about holidays?  Simple.  
Back some kde versions ago when I was still extricating my system from 
the grips of semantic-desktop and its evils, back when that was still a 
gentoo/kde USE flag option, I discovered that the holidays USE flag 
depended on something kdepim related, which pulled in more kdepim, which 
pulled in akonadi, which being part of the whole semantic-desktop thing, 
ended up pulling all that in.

But back then that was all still USE flags and as long as I wasn't 
running anything kdepim (which I had already exterminated from my 
system), I could toggle off the holidays USE flag as well, thus avoiding 
that whole dependency, thus ultimately but indirectly avoiding pulling in 
kdepim and at least some semantic-desktop dependencies via the back-door 
of the holiday USE flag.

So it wasn't surprising to me to see in gentoo/kde's 4.11 ebuilds, along 
with the changes forcing semantic-desktop, a change killing the holidays 
USE flag and forcing that compile-time option on as well.

Of course that meant yet another patch to apply, leaving the holiday USE 
flag dead, but forcing the build-time option and resulting kdepim 
dependency off as well.

So... I'm honestly not sure how much of this is gentoo/kde and how much 
of it is upstream kde, but I *DO* know that the no-holidays patch was 
something I had to apply to the gentoo/kde ebuilds here, as part of the 
whole semanticless patch set I ended up with.

So while all I know about is the gentoo dependency angle, it wouldn't 
surprise me in the slightest if kde/plasma upstream had made the 
integration deeper, thus making it even more difficult to do without 
holidays support, even if the build-time option is nominally still there.

I guess I'll know a bit more once I try restarting kde and see if 4.10.90 
fixed the 4.10.80 always-new-activities issue.  If it did, then I can try 
the calender plasmoid and see if it works with my patch or not, and I 
guess I'll report my results after that.  If that works, however, then at 
least from my perspective with the option turned off at build-time, 
nothing will have changed in terms of kde-upstream, only at the gentoo/kde 
level and my resulting patches to revert their forcing semantic-desktop.

So we'll see...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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