4.x transition blockage - workspace libs

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday, July 22, 2014 19:09:26 Michael Palimaka wrote:
> On 07/22/2014 06:10 AM, Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> > On Tuesday 22 July 2014 05:28:36 Michael Palimaka wrote:
> >> On 07/18/2014 06:54 PM, Harald Sitter wrote:
> > wrote:
> >> I'm very interested in renaming libkworkspace in Plasma5 at a minimum.
> >> What do you suggest for the include directory - just kworkspace ->
> >> kworkspace5 or go further and make the whole thing KF5Workspace?
> >> 
> >> I'm happy to provide patches, but didn't so far since there was
> >> resistance to the idea last time it was brought up.
> >
> > Personally I'm very reluctant to the idea of changing the includes. The
> > risk  of us having to hunt down breakage for weeks is IMHO way too high
> > for the possible benefits. We just had it too often during
> > the  frameworks transition that a header file got renamed, missed in one
> > place and it starts to randomly break to compile on some systems because
> > a kde4 header is picked. Then we easily waste huge amounts of work power
> > on people trying to fix their build. That's also the reason why I decided
> > against renaming the headers for KWin.
> That's fair enough, although I note the comparatively low number of
> consumers would limit the scope for breakage.
> 
> I personally think it's worth the effort (and am willing to do the work)
> for certain items because, for example, I can't offer our users the
> ability to run KDE 4-based applications that depend on libkworkspace in
> a Plasma 5 environment. It would be nice if we could, but if we can't,
> we can't.

Co-installability would indeed be very nice.

I wouldn't have much problems with such a change, I think it'd be fairly easy 
to catch on systems that have KDE4 in an entirely different prefix (my 
laptop), or not installed at all, and by our build farm.

libkworkspace would not be a framework, since we don't want to provide the 
guarantees for API and ABI, a libkworkspace works exactly for the release it's 
shipped with. That means just adding 5 to the name is good enough.

I'd also not complain if I have to fix the occasional build breaking.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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