[RFC] Possible KView Maintainership

[Nicolas Goutte]

On Friday 21 October 2005 22:48, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> I am considering volunteering to be the maintainer for KView.

I am not sure but if I remember well there were some issues raised on 
continuing to support KView.

If I remember well, the main one was there are a few similar applications in 
KDE:

- khtmlimage (kdelibs)
- kuickshow (kdegraphics)

(And there is also Gwenview, an extragear application.)

>
(...)
> My road map for this is to:
>
>
> 	Make some changes with the 3.x.y version so that it conforms to
> 	the current user interface guidelines.  I currently have patches
> 	for most of this.

If you mean changing in KDE 3.5.x, do not forget documentation freeze. You 
cannot change a GUI that is documented (except if the documentation is 
hopeless outdated anyway.)

>
> 	Submit it to Open Usability for recommendations.
>

> 	Remove some features to make it less complicated -- target it as
> 	JUST the general purpose image viewer (users that want more
> 	features now have other choices).

What would make it differ from khtmlimage then?

If it is just a few mimetypes, then better add them there.

If it is just a little more, then I would suggest that you get in touch with 
the Konqueror developers (kfm-devel) and try to get a common goal.

>
> 	Make some improvements in the UI code.
>
> 	Work on the current bug reports (there are only a few).
>

> Then, consider whether it is worth the trouble to port it to KDE-4 and
> see if someone will help us with the port.

Well, I do not know if it is really worth to do any great work in KDE 3.5.x 
anymore, especially that you would have still the whole porting effort to 
KDE4.

If you really thing that it is needed to keep KView, then may be you should 
start directly with Qt4/KDE4 to be able to use the newest Qt4 improvements.
(Perhaps also improve it to a mixed QImage and QPicture viewer in the kind of 
the KOPicture class of KOffice.)

Have a nice day!

PS.: I do not know really the state of Kuickshow, especially how much it is 
maintained. (However it is not a simple viewer and will probably never target 
as such. If merged, it would be more in the direction of Gwenview.)