Bug#579811: Does linking to libkcal4 really must pull kdepim-runtime ?

[Regis Boudin <regis@boudin.name>]

Hi,

On Sat, 2010-05-01 at 13:54 +0300, Modestas Vainius wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On šeštadienis 01 Gegužė 2010 13:21:24 Regis Boudin wrote:
> > Tellico is a collection manager. It is linked to libkcal/libkabc because
> > it is possible to mark an item as lent to someone, who can be picked
> > from the KDE address book, and to add to the calendar the date at which
> > they should be returned.
> 
> So it does access KDE address book and calendar.

Yeah, it seems upstream didn't decide to link against kdepim libraries
for no reason.

>  And now comes the news: you 
> like or not, as of KDE SC 4.4, akonadi MUST be installed and running in order 
> for the user to be able to access KDE address book or calendar.

It can. I have some news for you, too. I've never used that feature,
most tellico users haven't either. It is really a minor feature that can
be disabled at build-time.

> > So definitely not a core feature, and tellico
> > has been working with KDE 4 and without akonadi for some time now.
> 
> As I said before, KDE 4 is changing and akonadi gets more and more integrated 
> with each new major release. KDE SC 4.4 is the point, when you like it or not, 
> akonadi is mandatory to access KDE address book and calendar at runtime from 
> any application. So kdepim-runtime is a valid runtime dependency.

I understand that Akonadi is mandatory to access the address book and calendar,
but having such access is really not mandatory for tellico to be perfectly usable.
It is a collection manager, not a loan manager.

> So your problem is really about Tellico packaging. I can only suggest two ways 
> to solve it:
> 
> 1) Split off KDE integration into separate binary package (recommended);

splitting off KDE integration from a KDE application might be tricky...
Just splitting off kdepim integration means intrusive changes to the
code, which upstream might not want to merge, that I'm not willing to
maintain myself, and that I'm not sure I could stabilise in time for the
release.

> 2) Pass -xkdepim-runtime to dpkg-shlibdeps and put kdepim-runtime to 
> Recommends/Suggests manually.

or 3) Disable completely kdepim integration completely...

I will go for the dpkg-shlibdeps override. People who will want to use that
feature will most probably have the actually required applications installed
(kaddressbook, korganiser), which I might add as suggests.

> And finally, please reassign this bug to yourself :) I don't see how we can 
> help you here.

Yeah, not much help, here... If you think the bug is not relevant,
please close it.

Regis