[Kde-hardware-devel] Using Solid

[Kevin Ottens]

On Saturday 31 October 2009 02:12:19 David Hubner wrote:
> I was mainly thinking computer UUID, this is avaliable in HAL but i am
> not sure about other backends.
> It would allowed for hardware profiles per PC. I can see reasons for not
> adding it tho. This is a hard one to judge.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hardware profiles per PC" here? Care to 
enlighten me?
 
> >> 2. It would be extra nice if there was a used property as well as a size
> >> property in StorageVolume. I don't know if this is possible as HAL does
> >> not have this either. Probably out of the scope of a hardware framework.
> >
> > Yes, used is excluded on purpose as in most case we'd end up polling the
> > system to keep this information up to date which I'm definitely not fond
> > of. In fact this particular point got raised several times already.
> >
> >> 3. Would be nice if it was possible to check connected status on each
> >> NetworkInterface rather than global, or the Solid::Networking:Notifier
> >> statusChanged function to say which NetworkInterface caused the status
> >> change.
> >
> > Again, any use case for that?
> 
> This is mainly to tell which interface is connected when you have a
> wireless and wired connection. It could be used
> to tell when a connection is gone from wired to wireless. It would also
> be useful on servers which have more than one
> network card as you probably wish for both to be connected or to state
> which one is not connected.

Well, I see that as valuable information to show to the user on the workspace 
side, still I meant "use case for an application in general" (for instance I 
doubt a file manager, a picture collection browser, etc. would have any need 
for such fine grained information).

That's why we have the solid::control namespace in kdebase, for apps which do 
some finer grained tasks, like the upcoming replacement for knetworkmanager 
that Will is working on, etc.

> I am intrested in it mainly to show devices in a tree view that are
> unknown to specific types. I am not sure if this should
> be done at framework level or app level tho. I shall see what i come up
> with and if i am happy with it i shall submit a patch

Did you look at KDeviceListModel in kfile btw? Might prove useful, and you 
could still subclass it or layer a QSortFilterProxyModel on top of it.
 
> Sounds good to me. Just so you are aware and not thinking i am just
> asking questions for the sake of asking, i am
> developing a device viewer completely based on solid.
> http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Device+Information+KCM?content=113
> 365&PHPSESSID=9c45e78225170ac5e9b5f5ad54af1d79
> 
> I am hoping it shall grow as solid grows.

OK, I've been toying with something similar (albeit not as advanced than your) 
in my own personal sandbox, you might want to take a look at it in case some 
stuff could be useful (somehow doubt it but who knows): it is in 
branches/work/~ervin/solidhardwarebrowser

I admit that toying with it I'm unsure in which way we should complete the 
Solid API to enabled such an app without making such API a complete monster 
containing classes and methods tailored only for this one app. That's still an 
open point, although solid::control helped a lot in this regard so far.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud patron of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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