[Nepomuk] Dolphin and NepomukCore

[Frank Reininghaus]

Hi Vishesh,

thanks for your message!

2012/10/11 Vishesh Handa:
> Hey everyone
>
> Dolphin is one of the last major applications that still needs to be ported
> to Nepomuk2. I would appreciate it if someone migrated the code. Porting is
> quite simple and there is a mini guide on the techbase [1]

Emmanuel already volunteered to do the port (see the recent review request).

> The problematic part is that of the KFileMetadataWidget. It currently
> resides in kdelibs/kio, and uses Nepomuk1. We cannot port it to Nepomuk2
> cause of a cyclic dependency (nepomukcore depends on kdelibs, and with the
> port kdelibs will depend on nepomukcore).
>
> One idea that we had was to write a new version of the KFileMetadata widget,
> which would reside in the nepomuk-widgets repository. This new version could
> hopefully move away from simple (Label: Value) pairs and maybe try to show
> the data in a more visual manner. We do have certain feeders which push
> photos for various resources such as albums, artists, and tvshows.
>
> Another reason why we should move away from the KFileMetadataWidget is
> because it loads the file metadata in another process. This was done because
> the widget also works without Nepomuk and relies on strigi which is known to
> crash a lot.
>
> By using a separate process, one doesn't use the internal cache, and has to
> query the database.
>
> Any opinions?

On the one hand, replacing KFileMetaDataWidget with an alternative
that does not need the "read meta data in another process" workaround
for Strigi's crashiness sounds like a good idea to me. On the other
hand, I think that the "works without Nepomuk enabled" feature is
something that some people would really miss. There are users who do
not use Nepomuk, and I can already see lots of bug reports coming if
those users cannot see any meta data in the Infomation Panel any more.
Would it be possible to have the new widget read the meta data
on-demand from the file if the user has disabled Nepomuk in the system
settings?

> Also, I would like some help with the building of this widget. I'm not a
> particularly great designer.

Well I'm not a designer either, but a first step might be to just
replicate the functionality and design of KFileMetaDataWidget. For the
majority of the meta data, I think that showing "Label: Value" pairs
makes sense.

Best regards,
Frank