xmlgui (Re: kdelibs (partial) todo list)

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

On Tuesday 17 January 2006 12:06, David Faure wrote:
...
> Me too. But I think Simon's idea is to only change the way KParts merging
> is done (using the concept I vaguely called "action groups").

Not sure, see below.

> The current way isn't flexible enough in many cases, for the host. You
> embed a part, and it clutters your whole GUI and you can't do anything
> against that...
>
> But I think we can still keep XML GUI for the application's main rc file,
> and for popup-menus indeed. For those who don't like hand-editing xml files
> we can certainly cook up some GUI.
>
> This creates some trouble when converting a class between being a
> mainwindow to being a part or vice-versa [or modelling a part after a
> mainwindow, like in kmail] but we have that kind of trouble already due to
> the different merging happening for parts. [my initial plan for kde4 was to
> merge the two merging concepts :)]
>
> Difficult choices. On one hand being close to Qt, on the other hand keeping
> the best ideas from kde3, and on the third hand (yes :)) making things
> consistent between parts and mainwindows...

I think if we keep text files for the GUI, we should at least have only one 
format of them. 

On Tuesday 17 January 2006 13:03, Simon Hausmann wrote:
> Yes, editable text/xml files to describe the user interface are great.

Yes.
And personally I like xmlgui, at least for me editing the xml file is easier 
than dragging widgets around in a GUI editor.

> But can you think of a good reason not to use Qt Designer for editing?

No. Actually I don't really care whether these files use xmlgui markup or Qt 
ui markup. Staying with xmlgui markup would mean less porting efforts. 
Using Qt ui markup would give as a GUI editor, but OTOH would require some 
porting and would make our GUI building dependend on changes to the ui-file 
format done by the Trolls.

> I don't buy the argument that 0.0001% of our users want to hand-edit the
> xml file of an installed application because the GUI their distro shipped

The typical user won't do it. But there are users which do, see the konqy 
modifications on kde-apps, or the various konqy profiles, which were possible 
to do without coding one line in C++.

> sucks. For everyone else the run-time feature is a waste of precious
> startup time and memory.

That's true too. 
We have it since five years now or something like this, and while it's not 
exactly blazingly fast, it's usable fast on 500 MHz machines, and computers 
are always getting faster.

> And if you /really/ have to have that feature for your application then you
> can still use the QtUiTools library.

I'm still not sure, do you want to replace xmlgui xml files with ui xml files 
or completely get rid of text files for the UI  ?

Bye
Alex
-- 
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