[gentoo-desktop] Re: Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay

[Duncan]

Michael Palimaka posted on Sat, 06 Jul 2013 23:12:42 +1000 as excerpted:

> On 5/07/2013 08:02, Alex Alexander wrote:
>> That said, I do agree that semantic-desktop should stay optional in
>> KDE4.  Back in my KDE days I hated it and always ensured it - and its
>> ugly dependencies - stayed off my system. Unfortunately I am not part
>> of the KDE team anymore, so I don't know what their reasoning is behind
>> this decision. Hopefully they will reconsider :)
>>
> The reason is that code like this is appearing increasingly throughout
> the KDE SC:
> find_package(Akonadi REQUIRED)
> set_package_properties(NepomukCore PROPERTIES TYPE REQUIRED)
>
> That is, we must maintain hacks in order to disable upstream's
> requirements. They are difficult to maintain and also put us in a bad
> standing with upstream.

That's actually why I ended up package.providing kdebase-runtime-meta 
(along with ksplash, kdesu and kdnssd, for similar not-really-necessary, 
more-useless-hassle-to-upgrade when I'm running live-branch kde, reasons) 
here, since it's otherwise a dependency, and it in turn pulls in drkonqi, 
which at one point anyway required something kdepim related to send the 
mail, and when I killed kdepim on my system, I wanted nothing to do with 
that, so I package.provided kdebase-runtime-meta in ordered to be able to 
use (a copy of) the kdebase-runtime set instead, with bits like drkonqi 
commented so as not to bring them in.  (With stripping it's not like 
drkonqi ever thought the traces were usable anyway, and it's a runtime-
dep-only, that's only activated when an app crashes in any case, only to 
tell me it can't use the generated reports anyway, so why even have it 
installed in the first place, especially when it's pulling in some weird 
kdepim dep that I otherwise can keep off my system.)

Of course that drkonqi kdepim dependency was added in one of the betas a 
few feature releases ago, and as I hacked that and various other bits, 
gradually adding one package.provided or patch on another to keep kde 
updating, I gradually gained the experience and familiarity with kde 
internals that allowed me to even /think/ about doing the whole no-
semantic patch series I'm doing now.  Had things started out with that, 
I'd have not thought I could, but I'm into it deep enough now, it's just 
one more layer piled on the others.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman