aKregator in CVS

[George Staikos]

On Wednesday 08 December 2004 08:48, Frerich Raabe wrote:
> >    Furthermore, akregator uses its own librss right now because various
> > bug fixes have been applied.  However I'm sure that there are fixes in
> > kdenetwork/librss that aren't in akregator's too.  I think these fixes
> > need to be merged somehow.
>
> I have yet to be told about any bugs which are in kdenetwork's librss,
> other than the "bug" which makes it use kio_http's cache (and there has
> been endless discussions about whether one should do that or not, I don't
> really consider it a clear technical bug).

   - version parsing doesn't work for all feeds
   - doesn't handle Microsoft's UTF-8

  (those two I fixed)

> >    Finally, knewsticker and akregator solve the same problem from two
> > different approaches, but I think akregator is much more useful on a
> > day-to-day basis for people who use RSS heavily.
>
> Is tempting to compare the two given how much of the backend functionality
> they share, but such comparisons are flawed, and so is yours. The two
> applications have entirely different use cases: knewsticker is meant as a

   [...]

> I think the newsticker and aKregator are very similar in terms of what
> information is provided (hence stuff like sharing the list of feeds makes
> sense), but very different in the way the information is presented (and
> assumed to be accessed).

   This is exactly the point that users have made, and I agree.  They are both 
useful, but it is annoying to have to configure each separately.  There 
should be a way to share feeds.  The actual mechanism for this, however, I am 
open to.  By "the same problem", I mean "they both show news feeds".

> > The problem I have is dcoprss.  I am -really- annoyed at having to
> > constantly kill stray processes
> > ( http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68905 ), and I'm also not convinced
> > about how well dcoprss would match with akregator's design yet (I have
> > found knewsticker to be very unreliable due to the dcop service, but
> > akregator to be rock-solid).
>
> KNewsTicker does not use dcoprss at all, but if you could elaborate a
> please on how exactly you found it to be unreliable, I might be able to
> tell you the actual reason.

   Hm then why does dcoprss get started here?  That's the only rss app prior 
to akregator that I have ever used to my knowledge.

> > I think there should be a strong effort to merge these
> > backends or make them compatible somehow.
>
> Yes, this is a worthwhile goal IMHO. I've been brainstorming about merging
> the backend facilities (read: fetching stuff using librss, maintaining
> a list of newsfeeds) into a 'libakregator' library, and then merging
> knewsticker into aKregator, so that it still seems to be an independant
> application, but really only is an aKregator in applet mode. The
> ticker-specific settings could be added as an additional page to
> akregator's configuration dialog.
>
> For what it's worth, I just remembered that akregator already copied the
> filtering code from knewsticker, so that is prolly something which could
> be shared as well.

   Sharing code is fine even, but I don't care so much about that.  I just 
care about conceptually sharing the "source for the data" somehow.

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