multi-screen management

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday, August 17, 2010, Chani wrote:
> so... we had planned to have a little tool for managing the containments of
> multiple screens, in 4.5 - but there wasn't time. multiscreen has
> improvements, but also regressions - well, *a* regression - you can't
> access the containment of a screen that's not plugged in. the same applies
> to the per-desktop view stuff (they have a lot in common).

is there a list of use cases that must be serviced? your email has lots of 
"how to do X" in it, but it seems to skip the "why we want to do X".

> When a screen is disconnected (or in PDV, a desktop removed) the associated
> containment and view (for each running activity) should be automatically
> stopped - and resumed again when the screen/desktop returns. We can migrate
> panels, but not desktops, and it doesn't make sense to leave something
> running and inaccessible (having to manually stop it would also be Wrong).

it does make sense to leave something running if one can switch to it, though. 
if the switcher UI allows the user to do that, then it's probably fine.

> * I don't like how I ended up with two authorities on where a containment
> belongs: there's both the lastScreen/lastDesktop settings in the
> containment, and the place that running containment has in
> plasma-desktop's Activity class. that ought to be rethought.

they are two different kinds of issues, though, and are orthoganal to each 
ther. it may be possible to nicely merge the two, but they would still be two 
different sets of data and decisions.

> * Might it be easier to leave the config in plasma-desktop-appletsrc, and
> have the startup loading skip containments assigned to nonexistant
> screens/desktops?

possibly, yes..

> * Once this is implemented, I believe panels should behave the same way,
> instead of migrating. It's more consistent that way. thoughts?

i think it will annoy the users who previously sent in bug reports about the 
panel not showing up on their laptop screen after being migrated to another 
screen.

panel migration addresses a real world issue people run into regularly. 
there's a bug in it that i will try and track down (i actually finally ended 
up with hardware capable of replicating it with.. ), but otherwise i don't 
think much needs to be done with panels. they are already movable between 
screens.

-- 
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 --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20100818/ef999a68/attachment.sig