Plasma 5.8 and look and feel layouts

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 13.09.2016 13:12, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 September 2016 11:30:49 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
>> On 13.09.2016 11:06, David Edmundson wrote:
>>>> If we can fix the issues before the release, why hold it back?
>>> The first release is in two days.
>> Yes, the beta release, which is there to identify and fix bugs, right?
>> Of course the question is: Does the team consider the feature to be stable
>> enough for a beta release or not?
> that is not a bug, it's a structural issue, that i don't think it can (or
> should) be solved.
> and no, look and feel packages are always been there for the whole 5 series
> since 5.0,  so in 5.8 doesn't really change anything in this regard.
> they always have been a collection of configurations and not really much else,
> that's what they are intended to be and what they should be.
> They should *not* contain stuff like icon themes (and even less, things like
> plasmoids) as this would break things for real.
>
> what maybe can eventually happen is specifying dependencies with appstream
> metadata or stuff like that, even tough i'm very skeptical even about that
>
Having everything within the theme indeed does not make sense, but dependencies 
handling /would/ make a lot of sense.

We can of course release without dependency handling, but then we have to 
explain clearly to people who upload an L&F theme to KDE Store that they have to 
link to all other assets that are referenced in that theme and tell people to 
install those as well.
Otherwise creators will forget that, users won't understand and we get tons of 
useless bug reports.

Although L&F themes have existed since 5.0, so far they've usually been created 
by ourselves or by distributions, which then of course also ship all the 
components their L&F needs.
By including Plasmoids in L&F and opening them up for KNS, we open ourselves up 
wide for the possibility that people just put an L&F on the Store which needs 
themes and/or Plasmoids that are not shipped by default, and that's where it 
gets messy.