Configuring time and date from context menu of digital-clock applet

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 28 May 2009, Gökçen Eraslan wrote:
> A patch for $subject is attached. This was the default behaviour in KDE3,
> now users have to open systemsettings to configure date/time.

the "it was in KDE3" argument is meaningless. either a feature is good and 
desirable, in which case it stands on its own and doesn't need such 
justification, or it isn't a feature we want (for whatever reason(s)) and then 
such justification doesn't matter either.

this is very important because it changes how we think about features. if we 
think of things in terms of "what was in KDE3?" we'll end up replicating not 
just the good things in KDE3 but also the stupid things. and there were many 
stupid things in KDE3, as good as it was. (and yes, i was on occasion 
responsible for some of those stupid things too ;)

it's ok to use KDE3 as inspiration, just as it is ok to use MacOS, Windows, 
GNOME, BeOS, etc, etc as inspiration. but we don't say "This is the default 
behaviour in MacOS" either, do we? :)

ok, enough philosophy.

> Any reviews, comments?

i wouldn't do it from init(), but inside of contextualActions(). this delays 
the creation of the object, which is good for both start up performance and 
memory usage (at least in the case where the user never pulls up a context 
menu).

i also wouldn't bother with a createMenu method; it's 3 lines of code. just 
put it in contextualActions:

if (m_actions.isEmpty()) {
     ... create the actions
}

also, this line:

KToolInvocation::startServiceByDesktopName("clock", QStringList(), &error);

is just asking for trouble :) it works now, but as soon as another item called 
"clock" appears we get some fun behaviour.

instead, i'd suggest doing a query for the clock kcm from KServiceTypeTrader 
and start the returned service, if any.

> PS: By the way, there is a bug about time configuration. By default, update
> interval of digital-clock plasmoid is 60 seconds when showSeconds is false,
> and 1 second if it's true. If you change time from clock kcm and
> showSeconds is false, digital-clock applet refreshes itself 1 minute later.
> Maybe updateInterval should be hardcoded as 1 second regardless of
> showSeconds variable.

waking up 60x more often than necessary is a really good way to reduce battery 
life. the clock doesn't update once a minute just because it's lazy ;)

as Daniel points out, the correct solution is a dbus signal (probably from 
kded4) that we can listen to.


-- 
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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