[Panel-devel] Runner hierarchy

[Ryan P. Bitanga]

I see you're back from your vacation :)

On Dec 28, 2007 9:33 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 22 December 2007, Ryan P. Bitanga wrote:
> > Attached is a patch to support tiers of runners. This would allow
> > certain runners to be executed after the first tier and process their
> > results somehow. (useful for a mimetype runner or user-created action
> > runner).
> >
> > Ok to commit?
>
> looks good, though i don't particularly fancy the name "tier" ...
> maybe "priority"? anyways.. sounds good, and we should set the search runner
> to be low priority and the exec one to be high =)


Hmm... I was thinking about that but that wasn't my original
intention. I chose "tier" because it connoted a defined hierarchy with
coarse-grained control of the execution of runners. My intention was
to allow runner authors to distinguish between desired runner
positions (e.g. doesn't depend on other runners, depends on results of
other runners) without worrying about which runner of that rank ran
first. So within a tier, runners could have different priorities.
Priority feels more fine-grained but gives more flexibility. My only
concern is it's possible for a filter runner (what would be both a
tier 1 runner and priority 1 runner) not to process the results of a
runner with the same priority level but without dependencies on other
runners (what would be a tier 0 runner but still a priority 1 runner).
We could have both tier and priority functions but that could be
potentially confusing. Then again, that's what proper documentation's
for :)

Ryan