SoC Updates -- Kontact and Skrooge Plasma Dashboards

[Ryan Rix]

One and all,

Siddharth (who is working on Skrooge's Plasma dashboard) and I (who is 
currently working on integrating Plasma into a Kontact summary page) just 
wanted to send a quick update about our shared progress on our summer of 
code projects. We are currently working on a generalized KPart that any 
application can use to embed plasma into their application, with minimal 
effort or knowledge of plasma.

We're currently working through a few issues at the moment:

We currently have a lot of dependencies in kdebase-workspace. This is a 
big no-no as we don't want to require that any application that uses this 
kpart to require kdebase-workspace. This leads us to a few interesting 
conundrums that we'll need to be working through.

* I'm currently reimplementing the WidgetBrowser in 
workspace/libs/plasmagenericshell as KMenu inside of our source directory. 
Rather than having the add widgets piece exist as it currently is as a 
Plasma::view, having it as a kmenu affords us a few more options as to 
where it can exist. 

* Siddharth is currently working on eliminating our other dependencies, 
namely the config dialogs. 

After that, we get to a really interesting situation: containments. 
Currently all the contianments are in kdebase-workspace, where they 
/probably/ should be. Of course, that means that we currently cannot 
depend on any of them being there, including the one that I was most 
likely to use in my SoC project, the newspaper. This leaves us in a sticky 
situation -- the other roots we've sewn into kdebase-workspace can get 
pulled out. However, we _need_ containments, so we end up either finding a 
way to move them without upsetting a bunch of other things/people, or 
duplicating the code within the KPart, which I am completely against doing 
-- application developers should be able to choose any of the containments 
we have made, and not be limited to one particular containment. Any 
suggestions from the plasma folks are much appreciated on this issue (and 
the whole thing, really). Another similar one will be plasma applets, 
though they are probably less problematic, I'd think. Only the ones that 
we'd like to share between the dashboards and the main shells would need 
to be moved.

I'm fairly sure that those are the biggest issues facing us right now, 
once they are out of the way, it should be smooth sailing for us! 
Altogether, I think that there must be a solution _somewhere_ in the heads 
of my fellow coders :)

Best
Ryan Rix

-- 
Ryan Rix
== http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com | http://rix.si/ ==
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