Plasma Desktop Scripting Tutorial for Distros

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi :)

On April 23, 2010, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> Aaron Seigo has offered to do a tutorial on Plasma Desktop Scripting.
> He's proposing a session of around two hours on IRC to show desktop
> scripting to distribution developers and anyone else who's interested.

thanks for spearheading this.

a bit more info for those on kde-packager: if you package the KDE Plasma 
Desktop you really, really want to get this information.

plasma-desktop now uses Javascript for its default layout and setup. 

it also uses Javascript for configuration updates: kconfig_update, due to how 
KConfig itself works, and plasma-desktop are simply not compatible with each 
other and it is unlikely that will change. so configuration updates will (and 
are already, actually) pushed as Javascript.

in 4.5 there is now no more hard coded layouts in the c++ code at all and 
we've also introduced the idea of "templates" which are Javascript bundles 
that let us define how to lay out pretty much anything in plasma-desktop that 
we wish to. they also show up in the desktop context menu under Add Panel and 
will be exposed in the new Activity Manager.

this means that this information is pretty much key to being able to ensure a 
proper first-log-in experience for your users. it also opens the way for 
anyone with even a small amount of scripting experience to be able to mold 
plasma-desktop into what your audience wants.

but unless we get this information out there and in your hands and heads, this 
move from "edit a configuration file" to simple but powerful scripting will 
never achieve what it can. so please come, one and all, who are involved in 
creating KDE Plasma Workspace packages for downstream distributions, private 
deployments, etc.

you'll also be happy to know that there is good documentation for this growing 
area of Plasma here:

http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/PlasmaDestkopScripting

-- 
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 Development Frameworks
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20100423/7417fdd6/attachment.htm