Windows start menu item support for kickoff

[Patrick Spendrin]

Fabian Aichele schrieb:
> Hello!
> 
> The patch attached adds basic support for adding the contents of the
> Windows start menu to the kickoff applet.
> "Basic" means that it is possible to launch most file types one
> typically finds in a start menu (Executables, help files, PDF, html)
> either directly or with the default application associated with the
> corresponding file type.
> 
> What is missing currently:
> - Icon extraction
> - Folder structure of the Windows start menu (currently all entries are
> displayed sorted alphabetically only, regardless in which folder they
> reside under the Windows start menu)
> - Correct sorting order (sorted by description, not by name now)
> - Fine-tuning for program launching
> 
> Nevertheless, the code is functional (developed on Vista SP1), and I'd
> like to ask someone else beside myself to test this little addition.
> 
> Feedback, suggestions and criticism are welcome, but flame gently, this
> is my first attempt to modify KDE itself.
First of all, thanks for trying to contribute to KDE, this is greatly
appreciated.

Now about criticism and suggestions:
- please do not modify the *_EXPORT unless you really must do that. As
far as I have seen you have replaced class wide exports with function
exports, which is really messy and should be avoided. Please try to take
out these parts of the patch and if you experience any problems we can
fix that in a much shorter way together, I am sure.

- You modify kickoff as far as I can see, but this means that you would
have to apply your changes to every single menu application again (there
are multiple ones!). A better place for your changes would be the
generation of the menu entries in the sycoca database the "normal" Linux
  uses. This happens in the following files when running kbuildsycoca4:
http://lxr.kde.org/source/KDE/kdelibs/kded/kbuildsycoca.cpp#335
http://lxr.kde.org/source/KDE/kdelibs/kded/vfolder_menu.cpp#1577
So instead of getting this done in kickoff itself, you should rather
take the functions you already made and move them over to vfolder_menu.

- in applicationmodel.cpp you made quite a lot of changes that are
windows specific and are not really interesting to non-Windows
developers. To keep the code clean, bigger changes are put into a
windows only file which would be called applicationmodel_win.cpp and
which would only be compiled on windows. As I have said before, the
correct patch should go into vfolder_menu though, so it would be
vfolder_menu_win.cpp instead.

- last I have a small idea, which might be needed later: the generation
of the menus is only needed if plasma is installed. So it would good to
be able to switch the generation of the menus on and off.

This is a really big feature you are working on, I still hope you can
get it done cleanly, and I will help as much as I can.
So good luck...
> 
> With best regards,
> Fabian Aichele
regards,
Patrick

> 
> 
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