Kickoff / ALI extensibility

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 03 March 2008, Eike Hein wrote:
> Some of those also used to be available as standalone
> Kicker button applets. 

s,some,all,

> So, do we want public API to add new tabs to Kickoff? If
> so, should that extend to submenus in the traditional
> menu ALI as well, or is that a legacy thing confined to
> basic functionality?

this is probably best addressed by allowing additional models to be loaded at 
runtime. that way they could easily appear in the menu version, the kickoff 
version and even plasmoids.

sounds a lot like DataEngines, doesn't it?

> If we do want extensibility (I do ;), how can that be
> achieved with minimal code duplication? Should Runners
> be able to both provide matches to the search box and
> lists to custom tabs?

that's a bit outside the scope of Runners. i'd like to keep them a bit more 
purpose driven, tbh.

> How would Plasmoids make use of 
> the same implementation -- should it be Data Engines
> instead? 

i think this is a natural direction ... it does mean briding between a 
QAbstractItemModel and a DataEngine for kickoff's purposes though.

> (Makes me wonder about the demarcation line 
> between Runners and Data Engines down the road ...)

the demarcation is pretty clear imho: one provides lists of possible matches 
based on a query (up to the interpretation of the runner), the other provides 
access to sets of information associated with well known keys. you could 
certainly approximate (though not easily duplicate) a dataengine with a 
runner and vice versa, but they are much more optimized for their specific 
tasks.

-- 
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
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