Fwd: Hayes

Rob Kaper kde-policies@mail.kde.org
Mon, 27 Jan 2003 21:55:11 +0100


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Fwd'ed to the correct list.

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Subject: Hayes
Date: Monday January 27 2003 9:11 pm
From: Charles Samuels <charles@kde.org>
To: kde-ev-membership@mail.kde.org

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Neil wrote Hayes without implementing a part of the API completely,
properties, because he's he claims he  doesn't like the concept of
properties.  Properties are like X-atoms.  Any plugin should be able to
set a key-value pair, like "copyright"->"Virgin Schallplatten GmbH".  Neil
decided that he doesn't like this, so basically, setting a property results
in nothing happening.

Except you see, it's something plugins should be able to count on, for
example, my plugin Smoove saves the volume of each song, so you can have
quiet music loud, and loud music quiet.  It sets the property
"Smoove::Volume"->"50" (for 50%).  This doesn't work on Hayes.  Also, Ryan
wrote Flood, which is an HTTP frontend to noatun.  It likes to uniquely
identify each item on the playlist, so it sets an ascii hash for
each item.

So then, I finally get Neil to make property support optional, and he
implements another feature, which allows you to add a file to Hayes right
from a Konqueror context menu (indeed a nice feature!).  It communicates to
Hayes via its own DCOP interface, rather than using Noatun's own dcop
interface function "addFile".  Mind you this item appears on the Konqueror
context menu even if Hayes isn't loaded. Ok, very well, I'll just ask Neil to
change it to use the noatun function.  Turns out he didn't implement the
noatun function, because he didn't like the *name* of the function addFile.
Not only this, but he wrote hayes before we released 3.0 (and hence before I
started keeping Binary Compat), so he had ample time to tell me he didn't
like the name "addFile" and to suggest an alternative.

So, I think the problem here is that now that KDE is getting more and more
plugins, is it necessary for these plugins to properly implement the API they
are supposed to be used in.  Also note that Noatun Playlist plugins are
difficult to write, and take a while to stabilize (they are much like KDE
Style plugins).  And so the entire behavior of Noatun can change, making it
very hard for other plugin-authors to make something useful or interesting.

This is like having the author of a KStyle not implementing the drawing of a
widget, but still wants it in cvs.

I'm asking this as to see how to resolve this kind of issue, who should
resolve it, and what a policy/guideline should be for such a situation.


- - - --
Charles Samuels <charles@kde.org>
"Pacifism implies quite a bit of wisdom" -- Maksim Orlovich
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- - --
Charles Samuels <charles@kde.org>
"Pacifism implies quite a bit of wisdom" -- Maksim Orlovich
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