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

[Michael Palimaka]

On 23/05/15 00:33, 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?
> 
> Currently, I just comment out the geolocation dataengine in the
> corresponding CMakeLists.txt and remove the dependency when building
> plasma-workspace, but since I don't know about the code, I can't judge
> if this has any unforeseen consequences, if a data engine is missing.
> 
> Best Regards,
> Bernd
> 
> [1]
> http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=plasma-workspace.git&a=commit&h=78c97f5b426a1a2dd2a9e94de3e482fce9e754ff

The option would definitely be nice (and has been already requested by
some our downstream users). Unfortunately there's little point preparing
a patch as it's unlikely to be accepted (as Martin confirmed).