Plasma and Amarok

[Leo Franchi]

Hello plasma developers,

We over at the Amarok project are in the process of designing the central
context widget for Amarok 2.0, and we have been floating around an idea for
a plasma-like interface. It solves our initial problems (easy themeing of
widgets) but also allows for flexibility and, as plasma, is pretty awesome.


The two ways that we ha discussed for doing this were these: first, we could
copy the current state of plasma and modify it to suit our needs. This, for
a few reasons, is sub-optimal. It would basically involve forking the Plasma
codebase at this (very early) point in its life-cycle. We would not benefit
from any features/bugfixes added to the codebase. The second method would be
to "svn extern" a copy of the plasma dir in our source and compile it
internally as a library. This solves the problems of the first approach.

The only issue is that the current design of Plasma has a few hardcoded
search paths, mostly for KServiceTrader queries. In order for it to work for
us, we have patched Plasma to allow configurable search paths. The patch is
attached.
The only issue with that patch that I see is that I have had to
introduce a few static QStrings, not inside the private d-pointers
(because it does not make sense to save a copy of the system-wide
configuration data with each instance of an applet, for example).  If
this patch/approach seems reasonable to you guys, it would really make
our lives easier in the long run. Otherwise, we would be forced to
keep our own patch to plasma floating around that is needed before
compiling trunk.


Comments, whatever are of course very much appreciated.
Leo

p.s.: please CC amarok-devel in any and all replies, as we are not
subscribed to panel-devel@

-- 
______________________________________________________
Leo Franchi                    angel666 at myrealbox.com
4305 Charlemagne Ct         lfranchi at gmail.com
Austin                                 cell: (650) 704 3680
TX, USA                              home: (650) 329 0125
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