Dependency to Network Manager / kf5-NetworkManagerQt in plasma-workspace

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Friday 22 May 2015 16:33:25 Bernd Steinhauser wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> since the commit with the id 78c97fin plasma-workspace [1], it depends on
> NetworkManagerQt and hence on Network Manager unconditionally. The use case
> outlined in the commit is that the data engine tries to access wlan via
> network manager to find out which hotspots are around and use that to get
> location informations.
> Now apart from the fact that I wouldn't want it to do that and that it
> couldn't do it on my system, because it uses systemd-networkd for network
> configuration, this results in a dependency on Network Manager.
> I do understand that Martin when introducing this commit thought that most
> systems running Plasma 5 will run Network Manager anyway, since that is a
> preferred way of setting up network for many distributions. However, there
> are many systems, that don't need and use Network Manager and possible
> don't want to have it installed at all.
> Aside from my desktop computer, examples could for example include
> workstations at universities, which often have a static network setup
> (doesn't matter how that is setup).
> 
> So the question is:
> Could you make this feature, and therefore the dependency on Network
> Manager, optional at build time?

as I was addressed directly: no I won't do that as I don't see the need and 
don't have the time for testing that.

A patch doing that could be evaluated, I would recommend to not accept such a 
patch, but others in the team might see it differently.

In my opinion NetworkManagerQt is a defacto hard-dependency of the combined 
product Plasma we provide, thus also plasma-workspace can depend on it. My 
system I'm just writing on doesn't use NetworkManager either, nevertheless I 
do not think that compiling without support for NetworkManager is a valid use 
case which we as the devs should spend time on. Given that we all just run 
kdesrc-build which compiles everything (which is the same the CI does) we 
would not be able to track a build failure. I have been at that place with 
KWin many times and want our CMake dependencies to be as accurate to what we 
can guarantee as possible. Even more I just recently noticed that 
distributions do the packaging mostly automatic nowadays resulting in very 
important, but optional, dependencies to not be picked up.

Cheers
Martin
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