Kickoff / ALI extensibility

[Eike Hein]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> s,some,all,

Automatically? I thought they were separate APIs ... was
Kicker less of a mess than I remember ? ;-)


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

Which sounds like a pretty interesting thing to tackle :-).


> 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.

Yeah, the split as it is now certainly makes sense from the
POV of optimizing for the different performance requirements.

The reason I started pondering, though, is that if you want
to make Kate sessions (as an example) appear in KRunner, a
menu extension and a Plasmoid - all three -, part of the
task is the same: discovery of the sessions. Ok, the Runner 
implementation might still want some extra tricks suited
especially to incremental searching, but it got me thinking
if there might be some clean way to combine the two at some
point, to enable straight-forward sharing of codified know-
how like that. It's a bit of an overall design thrust of
Plasma to avoid duplicate data providers, after all.


-- 
Regards,
Eike Hein, hein at kde.org