reusing Konsole...

[dominique devriese]

Hi,

I'm rather new to kde development, and to this list, but I would like to bring 
up an issue here, since i've run into it on numerous occasions, and i don't 
understand why it isn't addressed:
The problem is that although konsolePart seems to do his job of terminal 
emulation very well, it is hard to reuse it in another program.  It simply 
lacks the ability to run other programs than the shell.  It determines what 
is to be run by doing getenv("SHELL"), and passing arguments to the program 
is completely impossible.

This is a _very_ annoying miss, and it seems to be _very_ easy to fix.  I 
would post a patch myself, if i hadn't seen Kevin Puetz post his patch here 
some time ago
(http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=101955160309112&w=2), and see it 
totally ignored.  Although i don't think his solution was the best, i do 
think this discussion needs to be held, and i don't see why this was ignored.  

This Konsole feature would be useful _throughout_ kde, for showing console 
programs' output (e.g. kpackage and apt output (now it's shown in a 
klineedit...), in kdevelop for showing compile output etc.), and for other 
stuff (e.g. i'm working on an interactive script widget, which would show the 
user a dcop shell of an application in some scripting language to the user (i 
have a javascript shell working, and i'm looking into python) (it would be 
something like kdelibs/interfaces/kscript, but it would get its code from the 
user instead of from a file))

Anyway, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, specifically if there are any 
reasons not to include this feature into konsole...

regards,
domi