QZeitgeist and Phonon

[Harald Sitter]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:50 AM, John Layt <johnlayt at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> * What is QZeitgeist?
>> A library that neatly wraps the Zeitgeist dbus API with some QObjects.
>
> Has there been a stable release of qzeitgeist yet, or plans to make a stable
> release with a api/abi guarantee?  I see it is in Gitorious, any plans to move
> it to KDE infrastructure or kdesupport and the KDE review that would include?
>
>> * Okay, but what is Zeitgeist?
>
> Could you also just touch on why Nepomuk isn't the right tool for this?  I'm
> vaguely aware they are seen as complimentary (afaik Zeigeist == when , Nepomuk
> == what), but a reminder for those of us not following the semantic stuff
> would be good.  How well do they integrate (if that even makes sense)?

I am sure others are more suited to answer this one.

>> * How does this fit into Phonon?
>
> Just to confirm this is an opt-in setting by the media player itself?  I guess
> the players would need to make it very obvious an option in the api as I'm
> sure there's people who would hate for all their fluffy pink unicorn video
> viewing to get logged ;-)

While I fail to see why people would hate for fluffy pink unicorns to
get logged (:P) it is outside the scope of Phonon. However. From a
Phonon API perspective logging is opt-in per mediaobject by setting a
property on it.

IIRC that looks a bit like this:
MediaObject *mo = new MediaObject();
mo->setProperty("_p_LogPlayback", true);

Whether an application graphically exposes the setting to the user or
not is up to the application (keeping in mind that the option might in
fact do nothing depending on whether logging is actually available).

>> 1) It is a new *optional* build-time dependency. If Phonon is compiled with
>> QZeitgeist, but zeitgeist isn't installed, stuff still works. Once
>> zeitgeist is installed, the dbus interfaces work their magic.
>
> So just to confirm the build time dependencies for qzeitgeist itself are
> really only dbus and qt, you don't need Zeitgeist?

Right.

> What's the runtime footprint of zeitgeist itself?  It appears to have a heavy
> dependency on python, gnome and gobject (at least that's what the openSUSE
> packages require)?  Can it be stripped down to the most basic storage layer
> and api for lighter install and runtime requirements?  Does it need yet
> another storage server to be running?

The minimal runtime dependency is python, python-dbus and
python-gobject. Which currently is what needs to be running to provide
the most basic storage layer (python) and api (python-dbus).

About the yet-another-storage-server problem... I guess this mostly
depends on whether Sebastian decides to store the data in nepomuk or
not. Should the data be stored in nepomuk I can imagine that zeitgeist
could just be turned into a request handler and forward the actual
data to nepomuk for storage.

>> 2) The zeitgeist developers (and even the Phonon devs) would absolutely
>> *love* to see more KDE apps use Zeitgeist. Its pretty cool.
>
> Cool indeed, even cooler if its nice and light and we get a KDE front-end for
> it :-)

I guess the KDE front-end comes naturally when nepomuk starts feeding
off zeitgeist data.

regards,
Harald