I maintain the package, and I use and need it.
You don't need it.
"totally unneeded" I want to refute, since "official" kate refuses to run as root (and for me also under sudo!).
That's by design. Don't try to run it as root.
If you thin "totally uneeded", please argue why.
I have already done so:
Repo's kate fully supports prompting the user for root write access, and also can open files via the admin:// protocol (if extra/kio-admin package is installed).
Non-root Kate can do everything a root Kate would be able to do. If you opened a file with read-only access, upon saving, it will prompt you for root credentials. If you want to open something for which your user doesn't have read access, you need to install the 'kio-admin' package from the repo. And then open that directory or file with the admin:// protocol. E.g., the following directory is only accessible (readable/traversable) by root: /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ Open it by entering the following path in Kate's Open File dialog: admin:///etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ Hope it helps! Cheers Marcell / MarsSeed