Review Request: Add an hidden option to set a translucent background for DesktopView

[Aaron Seigo]

> On 2009-10-01 19:24:19, Aaron Seigo wrote:
> > anything but the desktop shell painting the wallpaper is poor design. the window manager does not have enough knowledge of what is happening in the shell to do so properly. what, exactly, is the benefit of letting compiz draw the wallpaper? if it's simply visual bling, i'm really not interested in encouraging it by adapting plasma-desktop to such a broken idea.
> 
> wearenotalone wrote:
>     Thanks for your feedback!
>     
>     My intention was on the one hand to enhance the user experience for power users and on the other hand to increase (respectively restore) the compatibility with other applications like compiz. The user should have the right and the freedom to decide for themselves. With this patch, the user is able to use the wallpaper plugin of Compiz, if he really wants to. Any other user does not have to deal with this option (because hidden), due to the default setting "false" this may not cause any disadvantages / speed penalties for him.
>     
>     I use Compiz with multiple viewports; using the wallpaper plugin, I can easily distinguish between different viewports. In addition, KDE4 looks really great in cooperation with Compiz. To develop a proper mapping between the viewports of Compiz and the desktop / activities of plasma, I simply lack the experience. I did not want to wait until someone else does this, instead i wanted to tackle the problem by myself. My goal was to fix the regression in 4.3.1 compared to 4.2 with minimal impact on existing code. Primary goal was to change the existing design, behavior and code as little as possible. I also tried to stick as accurately as possible to the naming scheme and the coding style of the original authors.
>     
>     I hope that you can understand my arguments and allow us to use Compiz and KDE 4 together again.
>     
>     Yours sincerely,
>     WANA
>     p.s. The corrected patch will follow later.

"The user should have the right and the freedom to decide for themselves"

they do. they have the code. config options in software does not equate in any direct manner to rights or freedoms.

"Any other user does not have to deal with this option"

the developers deal with maintaining it, any bug reports that result from it and users pay for that overhead indirectly. there is no such thing as a patch that adds a feature that does no harm; the negative of more feature weight must be offset by benefit. in this case, it also goes against some design fundamentals.

it is therefore my decision that this patch which introduces a purpose-specific hidden config option is not desirable to the upstream project.

"My goal was to fix the regression in 4.3.1 compared to 4.2 with minimal impact on existing code."

it was coincidental that this worked in 4.2; it was not an intentional feature.

"Primary goal was to change the existing design, behavior and code as little as possible. I also tried to stick as accurately as possible to the naming scheme and the coding style of the original authors."

i do appreciate that.

as Sebas noted on the mailing list, this really ought to be a property of the wallpaper that the View can check. this would mean some new property in Plasma::Wallpaper and a way to signal that it has changed so the view can react if it wishes to. how to do that cleanly is the question. i don't think Wallpaper should have something specific to this, but perhaps some sort of properties system that can be set/changed by the Wallpaper (allowing us to add things over time and keep the API straightforward from the start).


- Aaron


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On 2009-10-01 18:07:49, wearenotalone wrote:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/1755/
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> (Updated 2009-10-01 18:07:49)
> 
> 
> Review request for Plasma.
> 
> 
> Summary
> -------
> 
> Since revision 928340 (http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=928340 ) its no longer possible to set a translucent background. Because of this you cannot use the wallpaper plugin of compiz fusion any longer with kde 4. For more information please see this bugreport: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199869
> 
> This patch adds an hidden option named "translucentBackground" (because of Qt::WA_TranslucentBackground) in ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktoprc (example):
> 
> ...
> [PlasmaViews][34]
> DashboardContainment=0
> translucentBackground=true
> ...
> 
> The default value of translucentBackground is false, because this is the default behavior at the moment. I also created a patch against the kdebase-workspace-4.3.1 source package of Debian Squeeze, which works fine for me and can be found here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199869#c10
> 
> Best Regards,
> WANA
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/desktop/shell/desktopview.h 1027876 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma/desktop/shell/desktopview.cpp 1027876 
> 
> Diff: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/1755/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> wearenotalone
> 
>