[Panel-devel] rfc on runner ordering

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all ...

i'm moving krunner/runners/ to plasma/runners, have moved the .desktop file to 
libs/plasma/servicetypes and changed the ServiceType from KRuner/Runner to 
Plasma/Runner. these changes are a follow-[up|through] with the move of the 
runner superclass to libplasma.

i also added the webshortcuts runner after some modification so now we can 
launch urls and webshortcuts. hooray =)

the final issue i approached tonight in krunner was how to order the runners 
at runtime. specifically, we want the search runner to always go last as it 
is (in theory anyways =) by defintion it returns the *least* specific set of 
results for any given string.

so i implemented a really simple system: one can now set in the .desktop file 
whether it should go first, last or (by default) normal.

this gets us to where the search is now sorted last ... however, i'm really 
not sure if it is what we want long term.

one approach would be to record the type of runner (informational, executable, 
uri matcher, generic search .... ????) and order based on that. IOW, with 
this approach the runners would get ordered by what kind of results they 
return. i'm not sure that's valid, however, since it would be both hard to 
catch all possible types of runner (so future proofing would be difficult) 
and i'm not convinced there's a good enough corellation between the type of 
results a runner returns and what order its matches should appear in.

another approach would be to use a numeric entry to sort on... so the search 
could have 1000000 or some other larger number so go last. the thing about 
*that* is then it's fairly non-deterministic if you start pulling in all 
sorts of third party entries.

we could also sort all results at runtime and not rely on simply the order 
that the runners are loaded at all ... but i'm not sure what the criterion 
would be in that case. we do already do this for informational versus 
actionable and exact match vs best match ... but that's not particularly 
helpful for sorting across runners ...

ultimately we could allow the user to select the ordering as well once we have 
the new configuration dialog in place (probably using kpluginselector for 
this?)

so ... thoughts?

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
-------------- 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/20071008/f7a427b0/attachment.pgp