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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    how to solve a dependency problem in kalzium
From:       Benoit Jacob <jacob () math ! jussieu ! fr>
Date:       2007-01-30 10:32:07
Message-ID: 20070130110348.G5724 () cantor ! math ! jussieu ! fr
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Hi List,

I need your help determining the best solution to the following dependency 
problem.

Executive summary:

Parts of Kalzium are being merged to an external library in order to join 
efforts with a few other Qt/KDE projects. I'm asking whether we should 
propose to the developer of this library to come develop it inside the KDE 
SVN (it's a very young project, not yet released). If yes, the question is 
where? playground and kdesupport come to mind. If no, the question is: 
should Kalzium then keep its own code in order to avoid a tough external 
dependency?

Long version:

The 3D Kalzium code is currently developed in-house, in libkdeedu.

But since we realized that there were two or three other projects doing 
similar stuff (Qt/KDE widgets rendering molecules with OpenGL), we decided 
to join efforts. So there's a new library, "libavogadro", currently hosted 
in sourceforge, mostly developed by Donald Curtis (CC). It is based on Qt 
and reuses parts of my kalzium code, and our plan was to port kalzium to 
use it soon.

This brings obvious advantages (joining efforts is always nice) but one 
major problem: Kalzium would have one more external (optional) dependency, 
on libavogadro.

As libavogadro is a very young project (started in september) there 
obviously aren't distro packages yet. Moreover, as libavogadro does much 
more than what Kalzium plans to use, including it in a distro just for 
kalzium would make it larger than necessary, which is a problem for Live 
CD's.

This is why we expect that most distros won't ship it by default.

Our plan was then to allow people to install libavogadro at the last 
moment, so Kalzium would say "sorry, you can't use the molecule viewer 
because you don't have libavogadro, but if you install it now, you'll be 
able to use the molecular viewer without need to recompile/reinstall 
kalzium".

But I discussed this with Laurent Montel and he said this would 
be difficult or impossible to do! Another issue is that libavogadro uses 
eigen, which is in kdesupport -- so there's a nasty dependency game 
here, coming back and forth into KDE's SVN.

Laurent then proposed to import it in playground. Then Pino told me to 
also consider kdesupport (especially as eigen is already there).

What do you think?

Another issue is that libavogadro is developed together with an app, 
Avogadro. If we import the lib, shouldn't we import the app too, at the 
same location? But the problem is: isn't kdesupport only for libs?

Well, as you see, I'm lost, smoke is coming out of my ears, and I need 
your help!

Benoit


 
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