Everyone has a difference of opinion about the value of Google services, but my desire is not to have Google following my every move on the internet. Not all would agree and that’s fine, but when I tried to remove google-gadgets thru yast2 the kdeworkplace package was dependent on it’s presence.
Browser software has come a long way in improving security and providing a way to choose which sites and how much functionality could be used by the server side of a connection and I don’t see any method of controlling this with the application as shipped.
Its a privacy and security issue for the user, I’d hope that in the future that this becomes a consideration by those that make that decision. In the meantime, I’d like a way to remove it.
It only allows for installing gadgets, it doesn’t actually add any by default.
So I don’t see any harm in it being there and I guess they had to implement it in a way that doesn’t allow for removing just the gadgets part?
I could be mistaken but the application seeks a google website that has all the available gizmos… and has the attendant risks of cookiemanagement, java(script) vunerabilties, cross-site scripting, etc.
This is a important issue for browsers, ALL of them have controls, other applications that go online have these same drawbacks amarok in particular. I can choose not to use that application if I wish, however, my point is that google-gadgets cannot be uninstalled.
It is entirely possible that google gadgets own program may do the things that you say however the way it is implemented in KDE 4.2 doesn’t even run google’s application unless you actually add one of the google gadgets.
Im not sure how KDE will respond to this but if you really want to uninstall it just ignore the dependence.
You could also compile kdeworkspace yourself with out support for google gadgets. There are options for those who do not want to have it installed on their computer.
The package installed is simply the framework for supporting, and frankly is just an extension of the core plasma functionality, just as with the OSX widget support.
There’s no outside communication unless you explicitly install a widget, and even then they’re sandboxed from your system.
You can uninstall it by ignoring the dependency, but keep in mind that it will likely keep getting pulled back in with each update. Alternatively, you could post a mesasge to the kde-opensuse mailing list and ask that the hard dependency be removed, but if google support is becoming a part of kde core for 4.2, they may not be willing to.