[Marble-devel] splitting marble and marblewidget

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi Kishore,

This is a tricky situation indeed.

From what I recall the situation is like this:

For the settings dialog there are two versions:

* A Qt-Only version
* A KDE version

Both versions use the very same nice .ui files for the tabs.
There's a significant difference indeed between both:

* The Qt version gets linked together on the library level via  
src/lib/QtMarbleConfigDialog.cpp. This doesn't pose a problem.

* The KDE version however is creating the dialog inside the Marble - KPart 
component (which is also meant to be shared by applications -- but so far no 
other application except for Marble itself really makes use of it). See:

http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Architecture/KDE4/KParts

The KDE version is reusing the very same .ui files that are accessible to the Qt 
version. See: 

http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Using_KConfig_XT

Usually this technology would make it more easy to write settings dialogs. 
However we are making rather use of it in order to provide a higher level of  
KDE-integration. 


Now if we basically assume that the KPart would become part of the "Marble KDE 
integration layer" (which would for now get shipped together with the Marble KDE 
Application) then we'd still need to have some access to the .ui files from 
outside the libraries.

Hence the .ui files would need to get installed in a similar way as the header 
files of the library are installed.

I think this is what it boils down to: the .ui-files need to get installed in a 
similar fashion as the header files in order to let the Marble KPart reuse it.

Do you think this is feasible? :-)

Best Regards,

Torsten
  












On Freitag 29 Januar 2010 17:39:21 Kishore wrote:
> While attempting to split marble and marblewidget so that the widget could
> go into kdesupport I experienced a few issues.
> 
> Most issues were related to marblewidget in its current CMakeLists.txt,
> installing header files being used by marble application. This i work
> around by installing them.
> 
> Header files in marblewidget, used by marble in turn include the UIC
> generated headers. This breaks the build. I have worked around this by
> moving the inclusion into the respective cpp file and  only forward
> declaring in the header.
> 
> Here is now where i am stuck. There are some UIC generated files of
> marblewidget (code inside src/lib) that are being included directly by code
> in marble. For example, marble_part.cpp includes
> ui_MarbleViewSettingsWidget.h. Does anybody have a suggestion for working
> around such requirements?
> 
> It seems to me that marble application has intimate knowledge about
> marblewidget and this bond would need to be broken for a proper split.
> Necessary functionality would have to be added to the widget to make it
> usable by marble.
> 
> Any suggestions?