Plasma desktop init scripting

[Jeremiah Summers]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 9:36 AM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday, December 22, 2010, Jeremiah Summers wrote:
> > It would be nice if there were examples for loading folderview as the
> > default activity (ie. classic desktop) setting its backend and maybe
> > placing a widget at the bottom right of the screen ie. a trash can. I
> have
>
> so ... you want us to write your init script for you ;P
>
> more seriously, i'm unclear as to what is missing in the documentation that
> makes this difficult to achieve. perhaps that's because i wrote it and so
> can't see what's missing or unclear.
>
> afaiu, what your script needs is:
>
> * a way to create a new containment with a given type
> * the ability to write a config value
> * the ability to get the size of a screen and/or containment
> * a way to create a new widget in your containment
>
> what is missing from that list? which items in that list are not well
> answered
> in the documentation?
>

It really doesn't matter as I do not know JavaScript so you could try and
explain any of that and the documentation could be Awesome as I'm sure it
is, but the languages I must know to be a packager is ever growing. Plasma
Scripting is great but it adds another language on to the list that I never
had to know before (or ever wanted to). Most DE package don't require a
knowledge of JS. I am not a web developer, but it seems the ever increasing
load on what I need to know to edit and run KDE, or Linux in general is
growing. Yes JavaScript is a great option, but look at what it (seems it) is
replacing, config files that were human readable, could be easily edited,
and placed in a default location. Most distributions (Like Suse) were using
a startkde bash script in /usr/share/kde4/env/ . Bash is pretty much a all
around known language for anyone who wished to go in depth at all in the
CLI. So by the time you came around to building your own version of KDE you
knew enough of it to do your own configuration.

So now comes plasma scripting an awesome feature, however the language of
choice is JavaScript. You're trading a lot of human readable files to edit
and keep track of for hopefully what will be one script. It sounds great and
is great in theory but now you've either left out the packagers that don't
like JavaScript and don't think there should be a need to learn yet another
scripting language for KDE or you've forced someone to learn yet another
scripting language for one small area of packaging in KDE 4. So you have
quite complexed moving to simplicity.

My point is unless you plan on creating awesome example scripts with
supporting scenarios (some thing much more complex then changing panel icon
locations). Doing a lot of hand holding at first (like mine) then interest
in this is going to be lost. As this perspective just supports in non-fanboy
KDE communities, KDE once again doing it "their" way and convoluting once
was quite simple for something much more complex under a guise of
betterment.

This feature has been out for how many releases? I have yet to see a
distribution to yet take off with it, many just use the default file, some
tweak it a little and some ignore it all together. There's obviously a
disconnect here and from my perspective (limited I will admit) it seems
Awesome documentation may not cut it, even though it's still appreciated.

Kind Regards

Jeremiah
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20101225/89fa4336/attachment.html