4.x transition blockage - workspace libs

[Harald Sitter]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Michael Palimaka <kensington at gentoo.org> wrote:
>> It's probably a bit late now, but we could just rename the offending
>> libraries in Plasma 5 (as has already been done with some).
>
> Since the libs aren't supposed to be used outside the workspace it
> doesn't really matter if we rename them I think. This would also be
> achived by giving them sensible names such as libkworkspaceprivate.so
> to make it clear that people shouldn't use the libs ;)
>
>> Regardless of whether the libraries should have been used originally or
>> not, it's really not a good situation when we can't run core KDE
>> applications like kget or popular non-core applications like kdevelop in
>> Plasma 5.
>
> FWIW, kget (kdenetwork), ktorrent and apper (exptragear) could
> actually be ported away from kworkspace entirely. They respectively
> use it to implement their shutdown-when-download-done feature. This
> could just as well (and IMHO should) be done via ksmserver's dbus
> interface as of course it is considerably more portable (at the same
> time it also is less explicit, so there's that). Also I just checked
> all three and in the case of kget and ktorrent the feature appears to
> be entirely optional (just like with kdevelop) ... OTOH it is a pretty
> standard feature for download things to have these days so I don't
> think compiling without it is very reasonable ^^
> apper has it as a required feature unfortunately.
>
> ktux (kdetoys) is an entirely different story:
>> message( STATUS "Ktux can't be compiled. Install kdebase/workspace before" )
>
> So not only do third parties not know they shouldn't use workspace
> libs, we (as in KDE) don't even know as is evident through apper and
> ktux.... I really really really think we should appreciate the issue
> and do something about it.

I  just discused this with mgraesslin on IRC and he's fine with adding
a compatibility build flag to 4.x that makes it only install the
necessary libraries to avoid file conflicts with plasma-workspace 5.

Does that sounds suitable for gentoo and if so, do you guys want to
come up with a patch? :)

HS