[RFC] Possible KView Maintainership

[Matthias Kretz]

On Sunday 23 October 2005 00:14, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> The current maintainer said that he could no longer maintain it.

That'd be me. And that statement is right.

> > If I remember well, the main one was there are a few similar applications
> > in KDE:
> >
> > - khtmlimage (kdelibs)
>
> IIUC, all khtmlimage will do is display an image as is at 100% in Konqueror

Right, khtmlimage is the most basic KPart based image viewer that normally 
does not have enough features. Scaling is a must have for a viewer. On the 
other hand it does incremental loading which is pretty much impossible with 
the QImage/KImageIO based approach KView uses.

> > (And there is also Gwenview, an extragear application.)
>
> The Gwenview maintainer is working on it with the intention of having it
> included in KDE.  It has more features than KView.

I think there still is a place for KView in the KDE4 world. And having 
Gwenview (and Showimg, and whatnot), the KView maintainer finally has the 
possibility to make KView a real viewer.

Actually my dream for KView was to create a lightweight viewer using KDE 
Component technologies that can be reused throughout KDE. Just look at the 
interfaces I defined (which I never moved outside of KView :-(). They provide 
a generic interface for an image canvas, and an Image-KPart.
This is really usefull stuff, but I never let it take off :-(

> >>	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).

Yes, it's probably best to remove all image editing functionality. On the 
other hand I wrote it in a way that KView only provides the hooks for editing 
while the functionality all goes into KPart plugins.

Which is an approach I really liked because you could have your lightweight 
image viewer, but if you just needed to crop, you didn't have to open Gimp 
(or Krita nowadays :-)). What would be really usefull though: add menu 
entries to open the image in an image editor...

> If you look closely, you will find that it has some somewhat hidden features
> that I never use and which don't work correctly.  Currently you can step
> through the images in a directory but this feature isn't 100% stable.  I
> don't know if this is needed or not.

Don't hesitate to ask me, I should be able to motivate most of the 
features. :-)
Especially the stepping through the images in a directory is a very usefull 
feature. Why it doesn't work correctly 100% of the time I never understood. 
At some point I gave up and hoped it wasn't my fault and would some day get 
fixed in kdelibs ;-) (though I did go through the kdelibs code as well).

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

I'd go for a standalone KDE3 application.

-- 
C'ya
        Matthias
________________________________________________________
Matthias Kretz (Germany)                            <><
http://Vir.homelinux.org/
MatthiasKretz at gmx.net, kretz at kde.org,
Matthias.Kretz at urz.uni-heidelberg.de
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