QPA plugin like functionality in frameworks?

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> Hi framework-developers and packagers,
>
> with two frameworks I'm currently in the need to have something like QPA. I
> want to make it possible to provide windowing-system specific plugins for
> frameworks using a private API. The need arises first of all in kwindowsystem
> to support wayland [1]. To implement it we need a dependency to KWayland,
> which is currently part of kde-workspace and not yet up to the quality and
> stability levels needed to make it a framework. The second framework where I
> need such functionality is kglobalaccel where kwin needs to take over a large
> part of the functionality of the runtime to make it work on wayland at all.
>
> I see the following possibilities to solve the problem:
> 1.Make it a private API without any ABI guarantee
> 2. Make it a public stable API with ABI guarantee
> 3. Make it a private API with so-version changes whenever the ABI changes
>
> Option 1 is closest to what Qt's QPA does, but I think this would be a
> nightmare for packagers.
>
> Option 2 could result in a nightmare for developers especially in the plugin
> infrastructure itself. With releases every month that could quickly end in
> classes like KWindowSystemPrivate32 and result in an unmanageable runtime
> check system.
>
> Personally I think Option 3 is the cleanest solution. Would this be acceptable
> for everyone? If yes are there any suggestions for where to install headers
> to, for naming the libraries, etc?
>
> Looking forward for your input,
>
> Cheers
> Martin
>
> [1] And obviously also other windowing systems if distributions/OSes want to
> add support for it.
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Hi Martin,
We already have something similar with frameworksintegration, maybe it
would make sense to integrate what you need there?
The biggest problem I see is that you want it in kde-workspace and
it's really complex to use a changing library within 2 different
release cycles. It will make things break on one side or another.

What you can do is a stable plugin API and then provide the Wayland
plugins from Plasma releases. X11 and others can remain within
frameworks.

Aleix