[Marble-devel] make marblewidget kde QTONLY

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi Kishore,

On Freitag 22 Januar 2010 11:52:07 Kishore wrote:
> I would like to look at this from use cases both in the interest of
> packaging and third party applications using marblewidget. I list down
> some random points in no specific order and would like to see comments on
> them.
> 
> 1) MarbleWidget should by default store user data in ".local/share/marble"
> on UNIX like platforms as defined by freedesktop.org instead of ".marble"
> as it does currently. 

Yes, is there anybody on this list who has looked into this issue yet?
I think Jens-Michael (jmho) or Dennis (Earthwings) looked into this at some 
point, but I don't know whether somebody has got some patch.

> Optionally, an application using the widget should
> be able to change this base location if it does not want to share its data
> with other applications. 

This is already possible to some degree. In addition to allowing to change the 
default path at compile and runtime -- see the third section here 

http://edu.kde.org/marble/obtain.php

It's also possible to change the data and plugin directory via the class 
MarbleDirs:

    static void MarbleDirs::setMarbleDataPath( const QString& adaptedPath);

    static void MarbleDirs::setMarblePluginPath( const QString& adaptedPath);


> The QDesktopServices class allows us to get the
> user data directory in a cross platform way.
> 
> 2) Plugins : Not all plugins developed for marblewidget are relevant to all
> applications that use the widget. An application should be able to select
> among the default plugins (provided by libmarble and libmarble-data
> packages) and also provide its own which are not seen by other
> applications. Is this currently possible?

I think there was a patch recently (during 0.9 development) committed which did 
that.

> 3) Allow the application to provide its own DGML files to marblewidget
> which as with plugins are not meant to show up with other applications
> such as marble itself. This is my personal need as I may be using certain
> proprietary client provided maps. 

That's something we'd like to provide, too. MapThemeManager is the class which 
retrieves the dgml files. 
Maybe we can redirect the lookup for the dgml files to a specific directory.
Hm, doesn't 

    static void MarbleDirs::setMarbleDataPath( const QString& adaptedPath);

already fully cover this?

> Access may even need authentication but
> i have not yet looked deeply into it yet.

That feature would be majorly cool. :-)
 
> 4) As was discussed on IRC and the wiki it is clear that some minimal data
> needs to go with libmarble while the rest goes with libmarble-data. If
> there is some consensus on this then i could attempt the split.

I think the consensus can be found on the wiki. If somebody doesn't agree, 
please speak up now :-)

> I have been doing some work on this which can be seen at
> http://gitorious.org/marble/marble/trees/marblewidget

Don't have time to look at it right now. But I will have a look over the 
weekend.

Best Regards,

Torsten