KDE4 being packaged

[Kevin Kofler]

Chitlesh GOORAH <chitlesh <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
> export KDEDIR=/opt/kde4
> export PATH=/opt/kde4/bin/:$PATH
> export KDEHOME=~/.kde4
> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$/opt/kde4/lib/:$KDEDIR/lib:
$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/kde4/lib
> Exec=/opt/kde4/bin/startkde

There are several reasons this isn't going to work that way:
* a .desktop is not a shell script, you can't have export statements there
* $/opt/kde4/lib/ in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH has a $ too many
* startkde isn't designed to be run like that!

KDEDIR=/opt/kde4 and KDEHOME=~/.kde4 shouldn't be needed, by the way. Look at 
my patches:
* KDE 4 with the patches looks at KDE4DIR and KDE4HOME, not KDEDIR and KDEHOME, 
so you're setting the wrong environment variables. You're actually changing the 
paths for KDE 3, which is a bad idea.
* The default paths for KDE4DIR and KDE4HOME are exactly the ones you're 
setting.

There are 2 options to run KDE 4:
* Run a KDE 4 desktop from the console. You need to telinit into runlevel 3, 
then run:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/kde4/lib /opt/kde4/bin/startkde
from the terminal. But you can't do this from a running desktop, so a .desktop 
file is the wrong place to put that.
* Run only individual KDE 4 apps in a KDE 3 or GNOME desktop. My patches are 
designed to allow exactly that. Try for example:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/kde4/lib /opt/kde4/bin/konqueror
(Note that Konqueror 4 was pretty badly broken when I snapshotted it. I don't 
know how much of that has been fixed in 3.80.2 or current SVN.)

As for why the LD_LIBRARY_PATH is needed in the first place, this is a side 
effect of disabling the rpath mechanism (-DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=TRUE). With the 
rpath, it finds the libraries. (In fact, this is exactly what the rpath is for. 
Rpaths are only bad when they refer to a standard path like /usr/lib 
or /usr/lib64.) I don't know why it didn't build for you without this option 
because it built just fine for me with the rpaths enabled.

        Kevin Kofler