Review Request: Add an API for installing missing Plasma engines. Use it when a requested data or script engine is not found.

[Kevin Kofler]

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http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/102175/
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Review request for Plasma.


Summary
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This is part of my GSoC 2011 work. Expect more Plasma patches related to this in the next few days.

In particular, the currently unused "force" feature of the new API is intended to be used if the user just installed a widget which explicitly requires a given engine. (By default, prompts are not repeated within a session to prevent flooding the user.)

The implementation is based on PackageKit. It requires PackageKit >= 0.6.16 and either Apper trunk or the backported patch from http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=kpackagekit.git;a=blob;f=kpackagekit06-plasma.patch;h=208427aa6cc072164b6a9ba48a30a954657ef892;hb=HEAD to have any effect. If the requirements are not met, no change will be noticeable at all, because the asynchronous call will simply fail and any errors are (intentionally) discarded. (We don't want to annoy the user with a pointless error dialog if he/she doesn't have PackageKit installed or his/her version is too old.)

PackageKit will also only actually find the relevant packages if the distribution is using RPM and yum (at this time) and if the RPMs in the repository have been built with my Provides generator. But that shouldn't be Plasma's problem. Any work in that area needs to happen on the PackageKit or distro side. Support for GStreamer plugins has been implemented in other PackageKit backends too, so it should also be doable for Plasma engines. And if a distro wants to use something entirely different from PackageKit, that's also possible, this is what the abstract EngineInstaller API is for.

The API is public because it might be useful outside of libplasma, and it is quite simple and generic, thus keeping BC should not be a problem.


Diffs
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  includes/CMakeLists.txt a967a92 
  includes/Plasma/EngineInstaller PRE-CREATION 
  plasma/CMakeLists.txt ef411df 
  plasma/dataenginemanager.cpp 988fe76 
  plasma/engineinstaller.h PRE-CREATION 
  plasma/engineinstaller.cpp PRE-CREATION 
  plasma/scripting/scriptengine.cpp fb8cd1a 

Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/102175/diff


Testing
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Verified that it compiles without errors and that it successfully prompts for a missing Python script engine on Fedora 15. (The patch is against master (4.8), but applies without changes to the kdelibs 4.6.5 in Fedora 15, which is how I tested it.)


Thanks,

Kevin

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