API

[Matthias Kretz]

On Wednesday 11 July 2007, Thierry Bastian wrote:
> Just one thought about "returning false if the backend can't handle it".
> From a developer perspective this can seem reasonable but if we're talking
> about applications it makes also sense to know in advance what are the
> features that are supported by the backend or not.
> Imagine you have a media player and a checkbox decides whether or not you
> preroll, you would probably want to enable it only if the backend supports
> this functionality.

Right, but that touches another topic: policy and configuration.

One important reason why the Phonon API is smaller and easier is because 
policiy and configuration are not implemented by the applications but inside 
Phonon, the platform plugin or the backend.

Going into use-cases here:
- What's the use case for providing a configuration option to the user to 
enable/disable preroll?
- What's the use case for providing the application to change how preroll is 
done?

Another question: If there are use cases where the user wants to configure 
preroll is it application specific or a global setting? is it stream type 
(MediaSource::type()) specific or a setting for all types of streams? Is it a 
backend specific setting?

I don't have all the answers yet, but currently I'm tending towards defining 
preroll per stream type and globally. That way it would not appear in the API 
and not in application config dialogs. It could appear in a Phonon 
configuration dialog. Here we're touching another problem again. For KDE it's 
no problem to have a Phonon config dialog. Where does it fit with other 
platforms?

-- 
________________________________________________________
Matthias Kretz (Germany)                            <><
http://Vir.homelinux.org/
MatthiasKretz at gmx.net, kretz at kde.org,
Matthias.Kretz at urz.uni-heidelberg.de
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