plasma-desktop on other environments (bis)

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

We've talked about doing something about the various components in plasma-desktop that would make sense outside of full-blown Plasma sessions.

I've been keeping that in mind, and the other day my Linux install (which I maintain in a parallel prefix using the same packaging scripts as I use on OS X) made me realise that plasma-desktop also provides components that would be useful for those providing KF5 as an optional "suite" for use with a completely different desktop environment that still runs under X11.

Either way, I've come up with a couple of patches (the patch-disable-unwanted* at https://github.com/RJVB/macstrop/tree/master/kf5/kf5-plasma-desktop/files) which represent an initial approach at evaluating what builds and what makes sense on a ~Plasma desktop, X11 or OS X (or MS Windows, presumably).

I saw that enough changes will land in the next Plasma release that my patches require modification, and I'm not yet at the point where I feel I can do a RR, but I wanted to put those patches in the open. The one for OS X also contains a few changes to files clearly set up to depend on X11 only optionally but that let hard dependencies (#includes and libraries) slip in.

I remember that some on here thought that a more "platform native" interface should be offered instead of the current KCMs, or at least that there should be a means to get at these KCMs through "regular" applications rather than through kcmshell5 and/or systemsettings5 (like kwalletmanager5 calling the kwallet kcm?). Both alternatives clearly require a good deal of preparation and implementation efforts, esp. the former.
Maybe the initial steps I just made today can get this process going by inciting to put at least the KCMs in their own project?

>From kcms/PURPOSE:
> On other environments the already provided equivalent should be used.  In

The problem with that POV is that those "other environments" typically do not know anything about KDE-specific settings, even if it does have equivalent settings (and it will probably more often than not be impossible to "link", say, native font settings to the KDE equivalents).


R.