Release schedule clarifications

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 24 October 2007, Frerich Raabe wrote:
> 1.) The technical possibilities of having a graphics view as the desktop
> are amazing and probably allow great freedom when it comes to designing
> your GUI. 

agreed. =P

> I had great fun brainstorming about KNewSticker TNG should look 
> like. Unfortunately I had no good ideas, but still :-)

go talk to some of your users ... they usually have all kinds of bizarre ideas 
that often dislodge something even better from your own head, i find =)

> than sobering. And the 'collidingmice' demo basically moves seven sprites
> over a pixmap background image (so you'd think that'd run like *snap* this
> - which it does, but only on Windows. I surely hope that the required
> optimizations can be done for Qt 4.4 or Qt 4.5 latest and that they don't
> reveal a design weakness.

on Andreas' laptop i've seen the same coliding mice on X11 running with (iirc) 
100 mice and the cpu barely hicupping.

> a) "Today's machines certainly have the power" - they do. However, leaving
> aside that I'd rather prefer to keep at least 95% of the processing power
> to my applications, the CPU usage is also annoying when it comes to laptop
> usage (more CPU usage == more power consumption == less laptop lifetime).

when does plasma, aside from your scrollomatic wonder reader, use more than 5% 
of the cpu for any appreciable period of time?

> b) "The API is what counts, and it rocks. The performance fixing should be
> left to Trolltech". I agree that the API is *sweet*, however I'd rather not
> embarrass myself by recommending people a desktop of which I cannot even
> say when (if at all) it will perform reasonably well. I'd rather not sit
> there and twiddle my thumbs hoping that with The Next Release(tm) it's
> going to be all happy happy joy joiy.

except that i've actually SEEN the improvements first hand. of course, i 
suppose i'm amongst that "don't trust you dirty trolls" group.

> All in all, despite the fascination when it comes to visual possibilities,
> I'm not convinced you can build a panel & desktop & applets on QGV on X11
> with satisfactory performance.

i'm running it here every single day with more than satisfactory performance. 
let me suggest that what you may be specifically trying to do is not prudent 
at this point in time. but to say that because you can't have an 
always-scrolling ticker in 4.0 without it using too much CPU therefore means 
one can't have panels and what not is just ... amazingly .. i don't know what 
the words are for it. short sighted? demonstrating an ability to only think 
in absolutes as opposed to rationally discerning cut off points? i dunno.

maybe for 4.0 we just try not to have constantly moving things on the desktop? 
to me that's pretty much just "stating the obvious"

(i haven't looked at your code to see just how well it is or isn't 
implemented; i'm giving you the (well earned) benefit of the doubt by 
assuming you haven't done something overly stupid)

> 3.) While doing the KNewsTicker port, I noticed that (due to lack of
> corresponding uspport in Qt), the Plasma people had to invent their own
> Widget and Layout system (so Widget inherits LayoutItem, Plasma::Applet
> inherits Widget and so on). This is necessary so that you can have e.g.
> little input fields, buttons, checkboxes etc. in your Plasma applets. I
> feel this is a gross duplication of concepts and probably a maintenance
> nightmare.

"it's necessary ... but sucks" that sums it up nicely =)

> FWIW, hearsay suggests that Qt 4.4 is going to be out in 
> Q1 2008 (so between KDE 4.0 and KDE 4.1 we will have SC and BC breakage
> in the Plasma library).

i did consider keeping the Plasma::Widget stuff in the library, but it hardly 
matters since Applet itself will have to change classes if we want to use the 
Qt QGV layout/widget classes in 4.4 (and trust me, we do)

> I can't shake the sensation that Plasma will not be as mature as I'd
> expect it to be for KDE 4.0. At least, at htis point, I'm not too motivated
> to continue developing with it.

that helps.

> Maybe it would be interesting to introduce 
> Plasma with KDE 4.1 (after all, then it has more time to mature and it can
> use Qt 4.4 - so real widgets and real layouts).

see my reply to Dan about this. it's equally addressed to your paragraph here.

> (please don't flame me to death, those are just some notes I took while
> doing the porting work).

=)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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