[Panel-devel] KPanelExtension

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all...

i've been pretty focused on doing q/a for kicker in 3.5 but spent some time on 
plasma hacking today ..

the core app should become a simple manager of components. right now we have 
two primary types of components: panels and applets. this email is about 
panels. as you may have noticed KPanelExtension has been moved into 
kdebase/kicker/libkicker, which is the stewing ground for the plasma libs.

over 3.5's kicker panels, plasma panels need to:

	- manage their own settings as much as possible
	- manage their own geometry as much as possible
	- not be restricted to edge-attached floating rectangles
	- be lightweight and generic enough to also be used for the desktop

things have been done to date to meet these goals:

	- ExtensionSettings are now contained within each KPanelExtension (KPE)
	- ExtensionManager now subclasses AbstractExtensionManager which provides all 
the methods needed by ExtensionContainer which is currently in kicker

going forward:

	- move UnhideTrigger into libkicker/ and clean it up
	- ExtensionContainer will be merged into KPE
		- at this point KPE's will achieve the first 2 items in the list above
	- refactor KPE into sanity
		- we'll have a jumble of two classes and this will require sorting out
		- how many of the methods in AbstractExtensionManager are needed?
	- alter KPE to meet the remaining goals
		- have KPE return a QRect that is the strut to be reserved, if any
			- this will fix the remaining issues with extensions like the universal 
sidebar still pushing icons around a bit
			- this will allow us to create the desktop extension
		- implement Floating

and then we can create the desktop extension and start talking about splitting 
out the applet library (libplasma), how to theme extensions, which ones to 
keep, etc. this will all at least start during aKademy, but will bleed well 
into september and beyond, i expect.

at that point we'll into Milestone 4 according to the roadmap:

	http://plasma.kde.org/cms/1033
	
huzzah 

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/panel-devel/attachments/20050819/1c6a2464/attachment.pgp