[RFC] Possible KView Maintainership

[Wilfried Huss]

Am Monday, 24. October 2005 19:16 schrieb James Richard Tyrer:
> > 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 :-(
> > 
> Perhaps (ultimately) merging the KView and KViewShell projects would 
> provide this uniform interface -- which would be good from a usability 
> standpoint.
> > 
> >>>>	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...
> > 
> Actually, KolourPaint will crop, but doesn't yet have the ability to 
> digitally adjust the selection (a needed feature).  We now have a KDE 
> scanner application.  I haven't throughly looked into the slide show 
> application issue.
> 
> OTOH, integration is an idea that some want and plugins for a standard 
> interface certainly has its points.  The issue is a product design one 
> that is a more general issue than just KView.  Currently, we appear to 
> be going with the separate app approach for some of these, but there is 
> also the (unrelated) KViewShell project.  If this could all be 
> integrated into the KViewShell app, this would be easier for the user.

As the current maintainer of KViewShell I strongly dissagree with this. While
it would certainly possible to add the ability to open images to KViewShell,
the result would be a very crappy image viewer.

KViewShell is a document viewer, and therefore supports things like selecting
and copying text, search, exporting of the whole document as ASCII-text,
outline view, hyperlinks, various page layout modes, integration with kile, ...

An image viewer would require a very different feature set and GUI, and even
more important KViewShell's internal structure would not be a good fit for this
job.

I don't think anyone would like to view his holiday photos in Acrobat Reader
either.

Greetings,
Wilfried Huss