Exception for Dolphin - KFileMetadataWidget

[Vishesh Handa]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:

> El Divendres, 21 de desembre de 2012, a les 16:27:17, Vishesh Handa va
> escriure:
> > Hello release team
> >
> > As most of you must know for KDE 4.9, a new package nepmuk-core was
> > released, and with 4.10 we are now releasing nepomuk-widgets. The
> > nepomuk-widgets initially just contained the Tagging and Rating widgets,
> > which were adapted from kdelibs/nepomuk/ui. I use the word "adapted"
> cause
> > their internals were ported to the new asynchronous APIs (which was the
> > reason nepomuk-core was created)
> >
> > One of the primary ways users tag and rate files is through the
> information
> > panel in Dolphin. The main widget in this panel is the
> KFileMetadataWidget
> > (kdelibs/kio/kfile/*). This widget has many problems -
> >
> > * Uses the old Nepomuk Resource API from kdelibs - very buggy
> > * Uses the old Nepomuk widgets from kdelibs - slower and not maintained
> > * Had a multi-process architecture which involved spawning a new process
> > which provided the Nepomuk / Strigi ** data. This was done cause Strigi
> is
> > known to crash a lot.
> > * Cause of this multi-process architecture it was very slow - specially
> on
> > the Nepomuk side cause it would re-create the caches each time the
> process
> > was run. This was especially wasteful because Dolphin itself uses Nepomuk
> > and would have those caches. (The caches are not cross-application)
> > * Hacking on the widget was hard - Its entire architecture is quite
> > convoluted.
> >
> > I wanted to fix this with 4.10, so I copied most of the widget to
> > nepomuk-widgets and named it Nepomuk2::FileMetadataWidget. This "new"
> > widget was added in the feature plan [1]. It was never marked as
> completed
> > cause it had some bugs, which I did not have the time to fix. It was
> > however, still merged before the hard feature freeze.
> >
> > I did not submit my patch to use this widget in Dolphin, as it had some
> > bugs, and I did not want to spoil Dolphin's experience. In hind-sight
> maybe
> > I should have submitted it, and gotten all the bug reports.
> >
> > Fast forwarding to present time
> > ----------------------------------------------
> >
> > I finally squashed the last of the bugs in the widget, and made it
> support
> > displaying indexing results even when the file was not indexed or Nepomuk
> > is disabled. The old KFileMetadataWidget had the same capability - It
> used
> > Strigi, while we use the new file indexer that I've been working on.
> >
> > I would like to use this new widget in dolphin for 4.10. I was told to
> ask
> > for an exception from the release team. We still have one more release
> > candidate to go, so it should get adequate testing, if not the full
> amount.
> >
> > Other advantages -
> >
> > * It is a LOT faster - and it feels like it (Patch attached, if you want
> to
> > try it out)
> > * Easier to maintain
> > * Uses the Nepomuk2 widgets which are actively maintained, and will thus
> > get the required bug fixes. They have been some bugs filed against
> Dolphin
> > and its tagging behaviour, fixing this would be quite hard in
> > kdelibs/Nepomuk, also I don't want to mess with that code base which
> barely
> > gets tested any more.
> > * Since Dolphin also uses Nepomuk2, and the new widget does not spawn a
> new
> > process for the Nepomuk data, it can re-use the already filled caches.
> > * This gives a much better experience even when Nepomuk is disabled.
> > * This new widget's internal architecture is a lot better, and it's easy
> to
> > modify - So it's easy to improve.
> >
> > If we do not ship this new widget, I'll have to clean up the
> > KFileMetadataWidget cause it shows a lot of ugly data like "Resource
> > Created", arguably this isn't very hard. However it is not something I
> want
> > to do. Ditto for kdelibs/nepomuk/*.
> >
> > So, may I merge my patch into kde-baseapps 4.10? It will get tested more
> > thoroughly in RC2.
>
> What's the opinion of the Dolphin maintainer?
>

He says I should ask the release team.[1]

[1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=nepomuk&m=135601861024534&w=2



>
> Cheers,
>   Albert
>
> >
> > [1] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.10_Feature_Plan
>



-- 
Vishesh Handa
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