Bug 352275

Hello,

I did not find plasma-workspace product, please reassign if this is not the right one.

Opening this so there will be a followup for [1] which was not resolved so far.

"""
Bernd Steinhauser linux at bernd-steinhauser.de
Fri May 22 14:33:25 UTC 2015

Hi,

since the commit with the id 78c97fin plasma-workspace [1], it depends on 
NetworkManagerQt and hence on Network Manager unconditionally. The use case 
outlined in the commit is that the data engine tries to access wlan via network 
manager to find out which hotspots are around and use that to get location 
informations.
Now apart from the fact that I wouldn't want it to do that and that it couldn't 
do it on my system, because it uses systemd-networkd for network configuration, 
this results in a dependency on Network Manager.
I do understand that Martin when introducing this commit thought that most 
systems running Plasma 5 will run Network Manager anyway, since that is a 
preferred way of setting up network for many distributions. However, there are 
many systems, that don't need and use Network Manager and possible don't want to 
have it installed at all.
Aside from my desktop computer, examples could for example include workstations 
at universities, which often have a static network setup (doesn't matter how 
that is setup).

So the question is:
Could you make this feature, and therefore the dependency on Network Manager, 
optional at build time?

Currently, I just comment out the geolocation dataengine in the corresponding 
CMakeLists.txt and remove the dependency when building plasma-workspace, but 
since I don't know about the code, I can't judge if this has any unforeseen 
consequences, if a data engine is missing.

Best Regards,
Bernd

[1] 
http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=plasma-workspace.git&a=commit&h=78c97f5b426a1a2dd2a9e94de3e482fce9e754ff
"""

There was great effort in the past to make KDE modular, this was a positive effort which paid off (unlike gnome).

Adding network manager as mandatory dependency for core component is a step backward, there are many people out there that do not require network manager nor any other optional functionality and still wish to use KDE.

If KDE is going monolithic again (runtime/build time dependencies) or core depend on specific services without intermediates (systemd / networkmanager), it just follows the gnome steps and will not be usable but in specific environments, these who wish to have a choice go to other desktop environments.

I, for example, am a user of KDE for the last 13 years, will be sad to move away, but will if choice is taken away.

[1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2015-May/041825.html

Reproducible: Always