[Panel-devel] engines, animators, oh my

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 10 June 2007, Michael Olbrich wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 02:11:15AM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Sunday 10 June 2007, Sven Burmeister wrote:
> > > On Sonntag, 10. Juni 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > >  - to update TimeEngine every second or just every minute
> > >
> > > This brought me to thinking about what the user should do in order to
> > > save power on a laptop, i.e. suspend all/some plasmoids. Is there a
> > > general "pause"-button or does the user have to disable each plasmoid
> > > and re-enable them when having the laptop plugged in again?
> >
> > this assumes that plasmoids draw large amounts power when the desktop is
> > otherwise sitting idle. if that's true, we're doing something very wrong.
>
> How about sharing timers? I can easily imagine 10-20 engines with 1s
> timeout. That could reduce the number of wakeups significantly.

yes, we may possibly want to share timers, but i don't think we have a good 
enough idea of what the system will look like to start designing such a 
system. it's one thing to say "share timers between engines" but quite 
another to actually implement it. there's a couple different ways it could be 
done that i can think of off the top of my head, and each one has strengths 
and weaknesses depending on what sort of use cases arise.

> And maybe a global power saving mode.

we're not there yet. it's not realistically feasible to figure out what is 
needed in practice here.

let's try and work on getting things to the point where we can start 
researching this.

> For a lot of data engines (e.g. for stuff from /proc or /sys) the update
> rate is rather arbitrary and may be different for different applets. I
> don't think the current api can really handle this.

this is actually one of the primary reasons for DataEngines: applets -share- 
the data aquisition, which allows data aquisition to be synchronized. the 
DataEngine pushes updates out, applets should not be pulling updates on their 
own. for applets sharing DataEngines, there is no concept of "different 
update ticks"

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

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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