[Kde-kiosk] kcm_kdm again

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 04:34:00PM +0200, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> Oswald Buddenhagen said:
> > btw, my call for help wrt some amazing idea how to significantly
> > grow kcm_kdm without making it unusable still holds.
> 
> Contact Thomas Zander, Aaron J. Seigo or the Relevantive people for
> that, they are actually capable for the job,
> 
one might think so ... but i've been pestering kde-usability like two or
three times already ... anyway, moving the thread won't hurt. :)
some points for consideration:
- we can't grow the tab bar, that's obvious. so splitting it into
  multiple pages navigated from the icon/tree view on the side seems
  mandatory. unfortunately, kcontrol has a 1:1 mapping between pages and
  modules. but this imposes problems:  
  - they'd all work on the same kdmrc -> screwup if multiple simultaneous
    modules in kcmshells. solution: distribute the kdm config over
    oodles of files. to a certain extent this even makes sense, but
    there's also a host of options where i'm not sure where to make a
    cut. also, it ain't clear yet, whether the most sensible grouping
    of the config in the files would be sufficiently fine-grained for
    "kcm purposes".
  - needing to re-auth for every page is sort of inacceptable. and
    caching the password is not the answer. solution: create a user for
    kdm, and su an entire kcontrol instance into that user. i also
    thought about dropping kcontrol at all and writing a separate
    config app for kdm. but both variants seem non-kde-ish.
- kdm has this utterly complex per-display config system which merges
  ideas from x resources into kconfig. i wasn't able to explain it to
  thomasZ in two attempts, so i suppose it's pretty pointless to even
  try to make the gui handle this in it's full scope ...
  i thought about abandoning the concept alltogether, but that would
  just replace a generic nightmare with lots of specialized little
  nightmares and take away the abandoned flexibility from the about
  10 users worldwide that actually need it. so the current solution of
  handling just a subset of the possibilities in the gui seems most
  appropriate.

> unlike you, me and the others on this list ;-)
>
that's for sure. :)

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