The original reason for having telepathy-logger-qt as optional dependency is that it was unreleased, since now this is no longer an issue, and we are maintaining it, we can make it mandatory and remove all the #ifdef in the code
Note to all packagers: if this extra dependency would cause an issue (I don't see why it would) please comment in the next 2 weeks.
Marking as junior job
I don't know if this is the right bug to hook onto, but this morning I finally discovered why I couldn't use telepathy as IM client. It turns out kde-telepathy-text-ui needs telepathy-logger to work but there is no dependancy from telepathy-text-ui to telepathy-logger, not even via recommendation(s). I use telepathy from telepathe PPA (0.5.1-ubuntu1) The error I got was a quite non descriptive "Handler no longer available for org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Error"
kde-telepathy-text-ui does not need telepathy-logger to work - without it you simply don't get history support, but you can still fully use KTp without any problem. Also text-ui does not have direct dependency on tp-logger, but it should depend (and we do recommend this in cmake) on telepathy-logger-qt, which in turn depends on telepathy-logger. So it looks more like packaging issue, for which you need to open bug at appropriate places (ppa's bugtracker/owner).
With all due respect, I can assure you that kde-telepathy-text-ui does not work without telepathy-logger. I arrived here, because I don't see any way to report a bug at the KDE Telepathy PPA page and hoped this was the place to report anything to do with KDE Telepathy...(albeit PPA related) I'll try to contact the PPA maintainers directly.
Yes, I would imagine that having text-ui with tp-logger-qt and having no tp-logger might lead to troubles. However packaging is nothing we can fix as upstream developers as we have no control over it; if you'd compile on your own, that's a whole new story and we do have dependencies suggestions there (and this bug is about making it mandatory, not just recommended) and errors in that should be reported here.
Further details on this: - Text UI can be compiled with or without logger support - If you're using Ubuntu packages, it will have the logger support - If you compile the text-ui with logger support telepathy-logger must be installed otherwise it dies. There is no runtime check - Ubuntu packages allow the situation to not depend on telepathy-logger, though it's installed by default on new installs - The crash/assert is inside libtelepathy-logger which isn't under our control - If you compile without logger support, it doesn't use anything inside libtelepathy-logger (or even link against it) so nothing crashes. This bug does not actually solve the issue, if anything it makes it worse. This bug is to make it so the text-ui can _only_ be compiled with the logger support. Which could make this situation worse.
Git commit bae0c58d4b2a9622deedc110a34059f4b6b45963 by Daniele E. Domenichelli. Committed on 09/11/2012 at 12:03. Pushed by ddomenichelli into branch 'filters'. Make TelepathyLoggerQt4 a hard dependency FIXED-IN: 0.6.0 M +3 -14 CMakeLists.txt M +0 -6 app/chat-window.cpp M +1 -7 lib/CMakeLists.txt M +1 -16 lib/logmanager.cpp M +0 -7 lib/logmanager.h M +0 -2 lib/message.cpp M +0 -5 lib/message.h M +1 -10 logviewer/CMakeLists.txt http://commits.kde.org/telepathy-text-ui/bae0c58d4b2a9622deedc110a34059f4b6b45963