New releases of KDE and Povray and a proposal

[Andreas Zehender]

Hi!

On Tuesday, 03. February 2004 19:50, CARVALHO Luis Passos wrote:
> Hello!
>
> In 30th January Povray 3.6 beta1 was released. Anyone knows what's
> different? They refer mainly internal changes but I'm always curious.

Year, I am interested in the changes as well. Are there new objects or just 
optimizations?

> Also KDE 3.2 was released today, so soon we will be able to start commiting
> again to head, right Andreas?

Yes, head is already open for commits.

> By the way, I'd like to propose, right now, for kde 3.3 if possible that we
> split PMPart. Here is my motivation: In order to create the object library,
> I had to instance an independent PMPart that keeps the scene inside the
> library object and holds it's own copy of the available plugins.
>
> The problem I faced was that PMPart, aside from keeping that also has the
> work of maintaining the application's actions. I temporarily solved it by
> creating a second constructor that does not create the actions. However,
> this really feels like an ugly hack.

PMPart should contain only the core functionality. All actions will move into 
the povray plugin.

I'd like to split the sources, too. A core library and a plugin directory. I 
just want to wait for the release of KDE 3.2 to contact the cvs maintainer to 
move the files. I hope I have enough time this weekend. At the moment 
everybody is busy to release KDE

> IMHO, a better design would be (the names could be better)
>    PMDocument - Holds m_pScene and services needed by PMPart and other
> components to handle the scene PMDocumentRules -  Holds the prototype
> manager and the insert rules PMPartBase - inherits from PMDocument and
> PMDocumentRules just to collect both under the same roof as usually they
> will be used together. PMPart - Inherits from PMPartBase and provides all
> the actions needed by the interface, as well as creating the main widget.
>
> That way, the part is never passed around and only a PMDocumentManipulator.
> Whenever we need to create a new/different scene view there is no need to
> create it from PMPart as that creates too many unnecessary things. We just
> create a new PMDocumentManipulator.
>
> Am I missing something? What do you think? How do plugins fit in this?

Not sure at the moment.
Plugins need always a PMPart because of the KDE plugin architecture. And the 
object library will need plugins to create and handle objects. The only 
optimization that would be possible is to disable action creation for plugins 
if no gui is needed.

Will have to think about that.

Greetings, Andreas

-- 
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 Andreas Zehender
 Master of Computer Science, Dipl. Ing. (BA)
 http://www.azweb.de
 az at azweb.de | zehender at kde.org      
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