Moving PowerDevil to kdereview

[Dario Freddi]

Il mercoledì 03 settembre 2008 11:46:29 Sebastian K?gler ha scritto:
Hi Sebastian,

>
> That's actually the design we (Kevin, Jonathan, ...) had talked about at
> Akademy 2007 in Glasgow. Thanks for implementing it. I think the overall
> design is really sane that way. :)

Great, I didn't know about this :)

>
> > The core is the KDED module. Polling was removed thanks to a system that
> > sets the polling time to the next upcoming idle event. Every time the
> > polling function is called PowerDevil calculates the minimum time for an
> > idle event to come, and sets the timer accordingly. For example, in a
> > scenario where you have a lot of events in a small amount of time,
> > PowerDevil polls the system every minute. For detecting system activity,
> > it uses the same grabbing system used previously in KDE4Powersave.
>
> Good to see that this feature in X has now made it into the feature-set of
> the desktop.
>
> > The KCModule handles configuration of the Daemon. Having a dedicated
> > application for it seemed to me redundant, since you can have it by using
> > kcmshell4. PowerDevil has 2 kind of configuration: a general one, and a
> > profile-based one. You can create new profiles and assign them to
> > particular events, PowerDevil will take care of kicking them in at the
> > right time.
> >
> > The KRunner acts like a shell of PowerDevil. By typing set-profile, set-
> > governor and so on, you can change on the fly what you need.
> >
> > The Plasmoid should be what the system tray was for old Power managers,
> > and it should basically have the same features as the KRunner.
>
> So we need to look into the battery applet and extend it with the needed
> functionality. I was planning on doing something like this for a while in
> the battery plasmoid, but I was missing an application that actually sets
> up the policies. For the battery plasmoid, we can use a popupapplet in the
> panel / systray area. The battery exposes a couple of settings, such as the
> ones you're offering in the Krunner.

That's great, surely the way to go.

>
> Speaking of which ... in the KRunner, when you get those specific matches,
> you could offer more options. For example "screen brightness" would show
> the following matches (maybe even dependent on the current setting):
>
> - fully bright
> - dim partically (50%)
> - dim fully
> - disable automatic dimming (when watching movies or demonstrating things
> or some such)
>
> That way you get easy tab completion, and the UI clutter is easy to control
> (since most probably other runners won't use the same keywords).

Implemented in latest SVN ;) Thanks for the suggestion

>
> > The code I'm putting in kdereview includes the KDED module, the KCModule,
> > the KRunner and the Plasma Engine. I'm not so good with Plasma, so I
> > tried to backport the current battery plasmoid and extend it, but with no
> > luck. I'd really need some help on this side.
>
> So let's merge the PowerDevilEngine and the PowermanagementEngine into one,
> and put the corresponding functionality into the battery applet. What are
> the changes you've made to the battery applet to turn it into the
> powerdevil one? I don't see many differences from a quick glance...

I didn't put a lot of work into the applet, since I'm really not good with 
Plasmoids. I was thinking about working with it with Riccardo and some other 
people, but basically I really need someone willing to help me with this task.

>
>  I also think this should go into kdebase, especially because it's designed
> in a way that makes it easy to put a different config interface (perhaps a
> more limited one with defaults already set) on top of it (sort of what we
> can do with the plasmoid). The kded module does all the plumbing anyway,
> abstracting logic and UI
>
> Of course, having only one engine and one applet reduces maintenance
> efforts, so that's what we should aim for. Let's discuss these things on
> the plasma- devel list, or on #plasma...
>

Sure, and I agree dropping both engine and plasmoid to improve the available 
ones, less work, better result. Kdebase is perfect for me, especially because 
it would let us use this approach.

> > Though the core is already working and it's fully-functional: it's being
> > tested since a pair of months by KDEmod users, and they're pretty
> > satisfied with it. The KRunner is also stable and functional.
> >
> > The code has no Krazy issues, compiles with no warnings and it's fully
> > i18n'ed. I'd like to move it to kdeutils trunk, if approved. It still
> > needs an usability review, a native english speaker's review of strings,
> > and some help on the Plasma applet.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> sebas

Cheers,
Dario

>
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