[Kde-accessibility] Re: System bell mess

[George Staikos]

On Monday 28 February 2005 19:46, Gunnar Schmi Dt wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I think I have to shed a bit of light onto the System bell mess:
>
> The mess comes from the fact that we have two "bells" and two different
> options in two different KCMs that do something different but sound
> similar if you think that we only have one bell.

  And one interferes with the other somehow?

> One "bell" basically is KNotify. This bell receives all events from the KDE
> applications. The other bell is the system bell, which gets used as a
> low-level notification mechanism by the X-Server and a number of non-KDE
> applications.
>
> The setting in the "Sound & Multimedia -> System Bell" module is used to
> get KNotify use the system bell instead of its homebrew own notification.
> (OK, most of the time we want to have the homebrew own notification, but
> if the computer does not have a soundcard we might want to get system
> beeps instead.)

   Or if arts is just a pain, or if beeps over the speaker interfere with 
music/other sounds, or....

> The setting in the "Regional and Accessibility -> Accessibility" module is
> used to configure the effect triggered by the system bell. Here you can
> decide to activate a visible bell or play some sound file instead of (or
> in addition to) the system bell beeps.

    Maybe there should be a common widget and common backend config file 
shared by both modules then.  The average user is not going to look in 
Regional And Accessibility -> Accessibility to find bell settings.  The Sound 
section is much more obvious.

> As far as I know (but I did not test it, though) the two options are
> working perfectly if you have configured them correctly.  Maybe the

   They need to work perfectly by default, and work perfectly after an upgrade 
too.

> > > > According to the TODO file in kcontrol the one in Sound And
> > > > Multimedia is slated to be removed for 4.0 when we are allowed to
> > > > change stuff.
>
> I am happy to see the option removed if "Use the system bell" becomes a
> possible response for each KNotify event individually. We do not want to
> always use the system bell, but some users might want to hear the system
> bell for certain events (especially with a broken sound card).

  That would actually be nice.

> > >   Ok, but breaking it instead of removing it is hardly acceptable
> > > behaviour. How do we fix this situation?  Remove the one from the
> > > accessibility module temporarily?  Make them cooperate?
>
> Removing the option from the accessibility module is not an option if you
> have read my explanation above. We have to make the two options cooperate
> with each other and we need to make clear to the user that there are two
> "bells".

   It needs to be fixed then.  It needs to cooperate with upgrades and 
pre-existing setups, and needs to work by "default".

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/