On Monday 17 March 2008, Michael Jansen wrote:

KParts is currently based on KXMLGUI. But KDE applications can either use KXMLGUI or not. If they don't, shortcuts are saved into a simple KConfig file -- see the second half of KActionCollection::writeSettings, i.e. the case where
parentGUIClient()->xmlFile() is empty.

I don't think it's a good idea to tie together the "global shortcuts"
functionality and XMLGUI. Before kde-4.0 was out there were talks about replacing xmlgui with something entirely different, and the strong tie between KMainWindow and xmlgui was a big problem (which has been solved with the KXmlGuiWindow split). The rest didn't happen, but let's not make that mistake again, I can already foresee that the aggressions against xmlgui will start again when kde 5 comes along [or possibly even before, with the two technologies alongside each other].

If you really don't like "saving all global shortcuts into one config file" (me,
I don't have a problem with that), then make them saved in the application's config file. More precisely, into the KComponentData::config() file, so that it works for
parts and plugins too.

Yes, normal shortcuts are saved into the xmlgui file (with fallback to kconfig
if not xmlgui), but that's just a way of having to maintain two code paths instead of one. I
can't see a good reason why we don't just always save shortcuts into kconfig.