It has been my understanding from reading replies, that kuserfeedback is not a runtime requirement and can be uninstalled.

I did not find this to be the case.

I downloaded kate and plasma-workspace, compiled, installed, and both worked. Then I removed kuserfeedback and got the following errors at startup of kate and plasma-workspace.

kate: error while loading shared libraries: libKUserFeedbackWidgets.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/plasmashell: error while loading shared libraries: libKUserFeedbackWidgets.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

When I re-installed kuserfeedback, kate and plasma-workspace worked again.

I did the install at multi-user.target and then rebooted to make sure.

Does this mean that kuserfeedback is a runtime dependency of kate and plasma-workspace, or any application that implements the kuserfeedback API?

Is there a compile time option to eliminate the kuserfeedback widgets, so kuserfeedback could be uninstalled without breaking plasma and applications that implement the kuserfeedback API?

stormrainbow wrote:/.../ Is there a compile time option to eliminate the kuserfeedback widgets, so kuserfeedback could be uninstalled without breaking plasma and applications that implement the kuserfeedback API?

If you check kate's source code, you will see #ifdef guards for KUserFeddback. You can compile kate without KUserFeedback.