As part of the KDE/Maemo effort (that should get a more generic name really…), we’ve already seen emerging some SDKs to help us target the relevant platforms, some Plasma mobile shell, etc.
Still, one of the challenges is also to widen the scope of our KDE Platform. For that, a draft plan was made during Tokamak4, and since then we’ve been progressing carefully on the matter. We tried to get as much feedback as possible on the plan, not rushing things to make sure we weren’t stepping on anyone toes.
Today, I’m happy to announce that the very first corner stone of this plan got delivered. We added support for “profiles” in our platform. The CMake scripts for it got committed this morning, along with some changes to libplasma which effectively becomes our first library supporting those profiles.
By selecting a profile at build time, you get a default setup for our libraries which will enable or disable some extra features and dependencies. For instance, if you choose the “Mobile” profile the feature set coming from kdelibs will be reduced but on the other hand there will be much less internal dependencies in kdelibs, this way an application will only need a reduced subset to be able to run.
This more modular kdelibs depending on the profile chosen is of course only a first ongoing projects, but we have other topics to tackle like the runtime dependencies (namely klauncher and kded) of our platform. On this area we still lack reliable data as it is much harder to track. Still reducing dependencies during build time will be a big leap forward. And I’m truely excited because we’re slowly (but steadily!) getting to a slimer KDE Platform.