[Kde-extra-gear] Yakuake support for new KWin blur plugin

[Eike Hein]

On 05/29/2010 08:38 AM, Andreas Demmer wrote:
> As far I have learned, the application has to explicetly define the regions 
> for KWin to blur. I agree this can be delegated to the KPart for the Konsole 
> but I completely forgot about Yakuake allowing semitransparent GUI elements.

Even if Yakuake didn't allow semitransparent GUI elements,
keep in mind that Yakuake has a split screen feature that
means that it can more than one Konsole KPart instance at
the same time. Since the blur region is per-window, that
means the individual KParts have to make sure that they
don't undo parts of the blur region set up for other
KParts when they set up their own part, and the same goes
for Yakuake<->KParts. This is the main reason this is com-
plex.

A simple hack would be for Yakuake to set up a blur region
below its translucent skin elements and the terminals, but
that would be fairly inefficient because the Konsole KPart
is in the best position to know when it does translucent
painting (and thus requires blurring), and because one
might want to have the blurring optional as part of the
profile settings so you can blur one tab/split but not
another, and so on. And of course it would also be in-
efficient to add the same hack to every app hosting the
Konsole KPart, considering users likely want blur support
in all of them.

That's all in the log I attached, too, of course :).


>> We'll work on it, but it looks like it will be a KDE 4.6 thing since
>> it would be a violation of feature freeze right now, sorry.
> 
> Ah, this is a pity because 4.6 is over a year ahead. :-(

Nah, KDE 4.6 is currently scheduled for release at the end of
January, 2011. See:

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.6_Release_Schedule


> Any chances for a 
> backport to 4.5.x as soon as trunk is open again and you successfully 
> implemented this feature?

Well, the Yakuake side of the code will become part of
Yakuake releases, probably #ifdef'ed to require 4.5 as
minimum version. There should be no dependency on 4.6
from the Yakuake side, unless we do end up adding new
convenience API to KWindowSystem that Yakuake would then
use.

The majority of the code changes will be needed in Kon-
sole however, and no, backporting that from trunk to
4.5.x is unfortunately not allowed - 4.5.x releases are
bugfix-only.


> Need a helping hand? I am quite new to Qt programming but I started over some 
> weeks ago with a few contributions to the new NetworkManager plasmoid.

If you want to have a shot at implementing this, tell me
and I'll try to support you :-).


> Greets,
> Andreas

-- 
Best regards,
Eike Hein