kwin and NetBSD

[Martin Flöser]

Am 2020-02-05 17:20, schrieb Kamil Rytarowski:
> Hello,
Hi,

> 
> commit bbf00fdd98085a275f474fbfdffe5e140948a64b
> Author: Martin Flöser <mgraesslin at kde.org>
> Date:   Tue Jan 23 17:28:18 2018 +0100
> 
>     Require libinput and udev
> 
>     Summary:
>     The main reason for not having it as a mandatory dependency was 
> that BSD
>     doesn't support it. But as I learned recently it is available on 
> our CI
>     system. So BSDs have support now.
> 
>     Even more it showed that the code doesn't compile if the dependency 
> is
>     missing. And there's one thing I hate: broken build configuration
>     options.
> 
>     So let's make UDEV and libinput a required dependency and get rid 
> of the
>     problems.
> 
>     Test Plan: Compiles
> 
>     Reviewers: #kwin, #plasma
> 
>     Subscribers: plasma-devel, kwin
> 
>     Tags: #plasma
> 
>     Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D10057
> 
> 
> Unfortunately this commit is not that correct. libinput is emulated 
> only
> by FreeBSD. No other BSD emulated kernel VFS (these systemd-oriented
> libraries such as libmount, libudev etc are rather considered as poorly
> designed not just in BSD circles..).
> 
> There is no plan to emulate libinput in NetBSD as we have our own APIs
> for this (wscons).
> 
> We already implemented a support for wscons in swc:
> 
> https://github.com/niacat/swc/blob/master/libswc/seat-ws.c
> 
> Could you please revert this commit and make libudev nad libinput
> optional again?
> 
> We intend to finish porting KDE/wayland to NetBSD.


I'm currently not an active developer and thus unable to revert or do 
any decision on it. Due to that I cc'ed the KWin mailing list for 
further discussion.

Please note that a revert is not possible and not sensible. As the 
commit message explains: the build flag was broken and nobody noticed. 
This would have to be implemented as a new feature and maintained(!).

I must admit that I do not think that KWin is the place to hold code and 
ifdefs for such distro specific requests. A clear sign for this is that 
you raise the issue 2 years after the change was implemented and before 
it was broken for an unknown timespan. I know and understand that BSDs 
are not up to the development speed of the Linux stack. But it's 
unreasonable to expect upstream to take care of it years later. My 
personal suggestion is to carry this as an out-of-tree patch in NetBSD. 
For me as former KWin maintainer it was always a mantra that we do not 
have distro specific code and only features which Debian supports 
(Debian as the linux distribution having support for most packages, 
being rather slow and also supporting multiple competing integration 
solutions).

But of course this is up to the current development team. If a patch 
exists it can be reviewed for its merits.

Best Regards
Martin Floeser