Re: [gentoo-user] KDE apps, with minimal KDE install

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 22 November 2009 10:33:41 Mick wrote:
> On Sunday 22 November 2009 03:41:35 sean wrote:
> > Dale wrote:
> > > I would also add, watch the USE flags.  You may be able to
turn some
> > > off, that may help as well.
> > > Dale
> >
> > Altering some USE flags was a big help. I had been altering
them, but
> > finally it worked.
> > I went from over 300 packages down to 32.
>
> Would you mind sharing what these flags were.  I have been
trying to get
>  rid of akonadi in vane and have run out of flags to take out.

You can't get rid of akonadi, at least not the server. It's a 
hard dependency of kdepimlibs. Currently, you can switch it off, 
but you can't avoid having it.

As to why you can't get rid of it, it has to do with what the KDE 
devs envisage for KDE-4, all of this is in public statements and 
blogs from around the time of the release of KDE-4.0. They want 
to build a totally integrated desktop, where all apps are aware 
of all other apps (where appropriate of course) and integrate 
with each other. So you can do things like have a message be 
received by kopete which fires off a plasma that does 
$NEAT_STUFF. Or, every PIM app hooks into the same backend store 
so you can see your mail history with someone in your address 
book and display it next to their tweets. These are just 
examples, the point is that KDE wants to give you a framework 
where other devs can hook this data up in ways not envisioned 
yet.

You can see this vision by looking closely at the so-called 
"pillars of KDE-4" - plasma, semantic desktop, akonadi, nepomuk, 
strigi, et al. It's not all about flashy eye-candy, it's about 
connecting information in visual way. To do this, your PIM apps 
need a common backend storage - akonadi. To find stuff that is 
semantically linked, you need a search engine - nepomuk and 
strigi.

It is simply not feasible to try and build software that can do 
this and also offer the feature to switch it all off. You could 
try and write such software, but it will be as buggy as hell.

Given this vision for KDE-4, one must realize that the days of 
KDE-2 are long gone. KDE is no longer a bunch of apps with a 
common look and feel, so if you don't want the features of KDE-4, 
then you should not use KDE-4. Lucky for you, this is Linux and 
OSS, so there are plenty of other window managers and apps out 
there to chose from. At least one of them must satisfy your wish 
for an akonadi-less PIM system

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com