questions about the NowListening applet and MPD support

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 17 May 2009, Eric Deshayes wrote:
> My first question is: is there a mailing-list for that applet and/or its
> data
>
> engine or is the general Plasma mailing list the right one?

this is the right list.

> Is there some documentation on Plasma (mainly about the data engines, the
> applets, the services) other than the Tutorial from techbase.kde.org or a
>
> mailing list to ask questions about the architecture?

you can ask here, or on #plasma in irc .. there's also a file on dataengines 
and services in kdebase/workspace/plasma/design/dataengines

> I kind of have figured out what are the data engine for but would that make
>
> sense to have parametrized datasource? In the case of a MPD data source,
> the parameters would be the server ip/port and the credentials. I have not
> found
>
>
> any data source with such a behaviour. Woud there be any other one?

there are several, such as the time, weather or twitter engines.

there are two common approaches:

a) put it all in the name of the source, and parse that out in the dataengine. 
this is how it is done in the time engine, where the name contains the 
timezone and whether or not to do things like the sun or moon calculations

b) name the source after the service destination (in the case of mpd that 
might consist of the hostname and port) and then use a Service retrieved using 
serviceForSource from the engine to add additional information such as the 
credentials. this is what the microblog engine does.

> Also, is anyone working in adding the support of MPD to the NowPlaying
> applet? I saw in the TODO that the support of MPD is to be done.

not that i know of, though people often are working on things quietly in the 
corners :)

-- 
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 Qt Software

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