Extenders in libplasma2 (or.. not)

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 15 November 2011, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> hi :)
> 
> after today's research and reflecting on the situation, i consider them a
> failed experiment. not a terrible one, but it didn't exactly succeed. i
> suppose it's the same thing as the old tear-off menus -> neat idea, few
> used them, created as many problems as it solved.
> 
> so ... i'd like to propose that we kill Extender, ExtenderItem and
> ExtenderGroup in libplasma2.

i say kill it.

to me extender is the typical "seemed  a good idea at the time"

if really needed again, we can implement afterwards a similar thing in 
plasma2.

now, crazy usual crazy idea moment:
funny thing, in qml it would be way easier to do them: we could have an applet 
that is not much more than a Loader item, that gets created when the dropped 
mimedata contains a qml snippet directly, so the loader would directly 
instantiate a component out of that (and save such qml source buh, somewhere)
this is quite crazy/scary and i don't want to do it right *now*, but if we 
will find again an use case for extenders in the future.. well, that would be 
the fairly easy way to go i think ;)

> this will:
> 
> * make the library lighter
> * make it much easier to de-QGraphicsView-ize things
> 
> the cons are:
> 
> * it means anything using them needs to be revised; however, as i hope we
> will have a QML notifications plasmoid sooner rather than later and as
> pretty much nothing else uses it .. i don't think this is a big deal.

the active notifications applet is of course way simpler, but could be a good 
starting point (not sure if we should aim to make them the same applet with 
platform profile support or have 2 instead)

> 
> i can't just move extenders to the plasma QGraphicsView support library,
> either, as they are (by necessity) deeply entwined with Applet and
> Containment.

+1, they can live in the qgv support lib.

and i don't think the ability to drop notifications on the desktop will be 
missed much (during 4,x this ability came and gone a couple of times already 
btw, didn't seem anybody noticed :p)


Cheers,
Marco Martin