K(Abstract)FileItemActionPlugin

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi,

2013/6/19 Sune Vuorela:
> On 2013-06-19, Thomas Lübking wrote:
>>> If I was a plugin developer here, I would of course think my plugin
>>> should be enabled by default and thus in my ctor call
>>> setEnabledByDefault(true)
>>
>> I would suggest to leave the path of plugin enabling as solution asap - it's not a solution at all.
>
> Yes. That would also be my suggestion, but Frank has actually committed
> code to kdelibs master that does this - targetting 4.11.
>
> Unless we revert it quite fast, we will have to stick with it, the
> setEnabledByDefault(bool), function.
>
> Having such a facitily also gives much wider implications:
> 1) is it allowed to ship poor plugins if they aren't enabled by default?
> 2) must other users FileItemActionPlugins also have to adapt to this?
>
>> Synchronous I/O in the GUI thread can, at least post-init, be reasonably considered a bug.
>
> I agree that bugs should be fixed, not worked around. And not by
> starting arms races.

I admit that the current "solution" is an ugly hack. But it was never
meant to be an "arms race". Please note that I proposed and
implemented this at a time when Ivan still refused to acknowledge that
there is a bug in his plugin at all. There was no real solution in
sight, so a hackish workaround was the only way to protect users who
have the plugin installed on their system (i.e., everyone who uses
KDE) and who do not use it, from its bugs. And to be honest, I also
needed this for myself, to prevent that this extremely frustrating
experience completely ruins my motivation to work on KDE in my free
time.

> so Frank, please, pretty please, can you reconsider?

I see that Ivan rewrote the plugin and that it does at least not do
anything fishy any more before the context menu is shown. I also
understand that people who do not have to deal with the bug reports
mess and only see the possible benefits of the plugins don't like my
proposal to disable all plugins by default. So yes, I am willing to
reconsider, and I don't mind if the ugly workaround is removed before
the API freeze. But I'd appreciate it if someone else (Sune maybe?)
could make the changes in the three repositories. I have wasted so
much time on the Activities issue already that I prefer to use the
little time that I spend in front of my development machine nowadays
on more rewarding tasks.

Moreover, I will from now on:

(a) Close all "Dolphin freezes/crashes/formats my hard drive when
right-clicking a file" bug reports immediately, unless the bug
descrition states that the issue persists when all plugins are
disabled, and

(b) If anything as bad as the Activities issue ever happens again, and
the plugin developer refuses to respond to bug reports for more than
one or two weeks, I will prevent that this plugin is loaded in
Dolphin, and I won't care if anyone says that I shouldn't do it
because it's an ugly workaround.

Best regards,
Frank