kdelirc news

[Michael Zanetti]

On Wednesday 17 February 2010 18:59:36 F. Scheffold wrote:
> > 
> > I'm still not sure if a plasmoid is of any real use here. The kded module
> > features a KNotification item indicating any activity and having a
> > context menu for interactions. I really can't see what a plasmoid could
> > do better here... In fact, IMO it would bring more hazzle to the user
> > forcing it to add the plasmoid manually to the panel for just exactly
> > the same functionality as the notification item brings out of the box.
> 
> My thoughts:
> 
> As the readme on the api reference says, a kded daemon is a service that
> runs in the background and performs a number of small tasks.
> 
> For my opinion a daemon (background process) should not provide a interface
> to provide direct user interaction. This should be done by a seperate user
> interface, which communicates with the daemon. So you have it loosely
> coupled.

KNotificationItem is "loosely coupled". It is a standard interface, 
communicating to the actual tray item over DBus. The whole DBus stuff is just 
hidden in the KNotificationItem.

> 
> Common example like powerdevil or networkmanager do this in excat the
> described way. They have no tray, they provide the interaction with a
> plasmoid over a dataengine and a kcm module. And they get events like your
> battery gets low or network gets unavailable with signals from the daemon
> handle to display. The other daemons e.g. khotkeys do not provide a status
> indiaction tray, only a seperate kcm configuration module for setup.
> Currently I don't know any kded daemon which uses a tray....

Check out knetworkmanager, korganizer etc...

> 
> And since kde 4.4 you are able to integrate plasma popup widget's (like
> battery  or network) direct in you systemtray . Just click settings for the
> tray and choose plasma mini programs and then you got it. The user only
> must do this at one time to get the applet available in tray.
>

Still a useless interaction... Enabling the daemon through the kcm module 
(like networkmanagement does) seems enough to me... Don't wanna have to add a 
plasmoid manually here.
 
> I'm also not sure what happened if plasma crashed. Maybe the kded trayed
> daemon will be also crashed...

A tray crash would not even be noticed by the daemon. The NotificationItem 
returns as soon as any system tray application (implementing the freedesktop 
notification standard) registers again.

This brings me to another pro for the NotificationItem: It works also on other 
desktop environments (without plasma) that implement the standard (e.g. 
gnome).

> The  other question is what the "common kde way" is to handle such issues.
> Maybe we should investigate these things first before we make a decision.
> 

As far as I can see plasmoids are only used if UI elements not available in 
standard context menus are needed. I see our use case just like the KOrganizer 
daemon. Its signalling status changes and provides very little interaction in 
a context menu.

Cheers,
Michael
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