RFC: Fedora 8 and KDE 4

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 22:31 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Jeremy Katz <katzj <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > > I hate -devel conflicts too, but the at least the .so symlinks conflict,
> > Then things *aren't* parallel installable.
> 
> A lot of compat libs work like that, the runtime packages with the versioned 
> so-s are parallel installable, the -devel packages conflict.
> 
> This is also what upstream KDE is planning to deliver.

This doesn't actually help anyone, though :(  

> > Conflicts like this just aren't acceptable to have in Fedora because now
> > _I_ as a developer have to choose which I'm developing apps for.  And if
> 
> Guess why I hate them too.
> There's the possibility of switching between the packages or of using a mock 
> chroot, but that sucks.

Yes.  A lot.

> > I'm just building apps that I find online, I'm going to be wanting to
> > build for both APIs.
> 
> Same as above.
> 
> > And that makes our user experience suck.  If upstream doesn't see that,
> > then it might be worth doing like we've had to do for some other
> > libraries to get fully parallel installable even if it's not the path of
> > upstream :(
> 
> Sure I could patch the heck out of KDE to install the symlinks 
> into /usr/lib/kde[34], rename conflicting binaries etc., but then we'd probably 
> have to patch the heck out of all applications building against it. KDE doesn't 
> use pkg-config, and kde-config has no --libs option where you can easily add 
> a -L foo option. And this doesn't even cover stuff like kconfig_compiler.

Or the case could be made to upstream as to why this is important.
Otherwise, I think it's going to be really hard to move Fedora to KDE4
until things are ported and we can drop kdelibs3 compatibility.

> Or we could install one of the 2 KDE versions into a custom prefix 
> like /opt/kde3 or /opt/kde4, and in fact this is what my current kde*4 packages  
> do, but then good bye FHS.

Yeah, that's not very ideal either.  

> > But one would hope that when presented with reason and
> > patches, upstream would be willing to come along.  Because every other
> > distribution is going to have the same questions, concerns and problems
> 
> Rex Dieter, I think you have the best contacts upstream, could you please take 
> this up with them?
> 
> But I'm not sure about the "every other distribution" part. OpenSUSE had KDE 3 
> in /opt/kde3, so they're not affected by most of this, and the others probably 
> just have the -devel packages conflict.

The problem for us is that conflicts are very very strongly discouraged,
especially for things that are as prominent as KDE.  While the
guidelines do allow for a cop-out of it not being possible sometimes
with compat packages, that's really in the "it should be avoided"
category and doing it for huge swaths like "KDE3 development" is just
going to suck as far as providing a good KDE experience.

The right answer here really is that we need people to get involved and
work with upstream to make this sane.  As much as it will be painful to
point them at something written by Havoc, the points there are
incredibly salient and very true.  Otherwise, it might be wise just to
keep KDE 4 entirely on the sidelines (in side paths or whatever) until
it's matured to the point that the worry for KDE3 apps, etc is reduced

Jeremy