SoC Updates -- Kontact and Skrooge Plasma Dashboards

[Leo Franchi]

On 23 Apr 2010, at 07:32, Ryan Rix wrote:
> 
> 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.

Let me start by saying i have never actually used the newspaper containment :) I don't know exactly how it works nor exactly what it looks like. The following is from my experience in using libplasma for Amarok's Context View (which only depends on kdelibs, no kdebase-workspace dependency). 

You might want more control over the applets than the newspaper containment---again, I'm not sure, but in my experience, apps with different use-cases, form factors, and intended plasma widgets will want to tweak the interface, and if you just pick up the newspaper containment in -workspace, it may not do exactly everything that you want (of course, it may be perfect. then ignore my whole email). Furthermore, it's not that hard to write a containment that does exactly what you want. It's not a lot of lines of code---especially as you have a very "locked down" interface and will deal with one mode of interaction---no dealing with touchpads, for example.

Anyway, I would first look at your list of requirements, and how you want to interact with the Kontact/Skrooge dashboard, and if you want anything different from the newspaper containment, to not feel scared by the work to just write your own.

cheers,
leo
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Leo Franchi				(512) 775 5637
Tufts University 2010          

lfranchi at kde.org
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu