There are a lot of executables in $KDEDIR/bin which are used for internal purposes within KDE and are not intended to be directly executed by the end user. Having these in the user's $PATH is not necessary and has overheads for the shell (and for the user, when doing tab-completion of a command).
Maybe the forthcoming next major release of KDE (i.e. that based on Qt5 and Frameworks, whether it ends up being called "KDE 5" or something else) would be a good time to review what is installed here, and move anything that is not intended to be run by the user into $KDEDIR/lib/kde4/libexec? KStandardDirs::findExe() already searches there (before $PATH or $KDEDIR/bin), so there should be no serious compatibility problems. I could submit bugs for all of the individual components that install such things, but this message is just to gauge the reaction first. Here is a quick survey of my current $KDEDIR/bin, I'm not sure about the purpose of all of these executables but have certainly never had the occasion to run any of them as a user. Some of them are even dangerous to run... *.kss <-- all screen savers akonadi_* akonadiserver amarok_afttagger amarokcollectionscanner curconvd dtvdaemon kactivitymanagerd kalarmautostart kapplymousetheme kbuildsycoca4 <-- but useful for the user to run sometimes kcheckrunning kcminit kcminit_startup kcookiejar4 kded4 kdeinit4 kdeinit4_shutdown kdeinit4_wrapper kdekillall kdostartupconfig4 kfilemetadatareader khotnewstuff-upload kio_svn_helper kjotsmigrator kmail-migrator kmailcvt knotify4 kpartloader krandrstartup kres-migrator ksmserver kstartupconfig4 ksysguardd ktesnippets_editor ktmagnetdownloader kuiserver kwalletd kwrapper4 kwrited lucene2indexer nepomukindexer nepomukserver nepomukservicestub nspluginscan plasma-remote-helper rdfindexer servicemenudeinstallation servicemenuinstallation sopranod strigidaemon xmlindexer -- Jonathan Marten http://www.keelhaul.demon.co.uk Twickenham, UK [email protected]
