plasma & plasma-desktop

[Mantia Andras]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

> On Friday 30 January 2009, Andras Mantia wrote:
>>  It happens because I have a distro packaged KDE 4.1 (and now 4.2) in
>> /usr and a self compiled one in /opt/kde4. Even though the last one is
>> ahead in the path, in doesn't help in this case, as plasma is picked up
>> from /usr.
> 
> a) why would you have 4.1 and 4.2 both in your path? that's just asking
> for all sorts of issues with libraries and plugins that aren't compatible.

Because I want to work on trunk, but have a stable KDE available? Some 
distributions put KDE4 to /usr, so it is not an option to get out from the 
path. So when I log in into my trunk KDE build, it sets the PATH, 
XDG_DATA_DIR and what is needed to first point my self compiled KDE dir and 
later to what was there. This works fine, as libraries and binaries are first 
found in my own KDE build.
 The problem appeared in case of plasma, because my own KDE dir now has only 
plasma-desktop, not plasma. But as "plasma" is in /usr/bin, it is found and 
run.

> b) the upgrade mechanism is to replace plasma.desktop with plasma-
> desktop.desktop. i suppose we could just overwrite plasma.desktop and be
> stuck with that entry ... but afaik that's not supposed to be a legal
> situation to have both anyways.

Ok, so the problem is that /usr/share/autostart has a plasma.desktop (distro 
installed) and /opt/kde4/share/autostart has a plasma-desktop.desktop . 
XDG_DATA_DIRS=/opt/kde4/share:/usr/share:/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/etc/opt/kde3/share:/opt/kde3/share:/opt/kde4/share
KDEDIRS=/opt/kde4:/usr

Obviously I can't remove /usr/share from there as many other thing won't be 
found.

This setup works fine for quite some time, worked in KDE3 times, and since 
KDE4 as well. 

I admit for end users this will be less a problem if distributions create a 
proper package that removes plasma.desktop and plasma when you upgrade, it 
is a hassle for those compiling from sources. I don't know how Gentoo or 
Slackware handles these.

I think you should keep plasma.desktop for the desktop file name. 

Andras