IconTasks taskmanager changes

[Martin Gräßlin]

Am 26.10.2011 13:30, schrieb Craig Drummond:
> For the last couple of months I've been working on an icon-only task
> bar called IconTasks. (I've just uploaded the latest, 0.8.1, to
> kde-look -
> http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Icon+Tasks?content=144808)
>
> This contains a forked version of taskmanager, which I would like to
> fold back into the main taskmanager code. Seeing as soft feature
> freeze is on the 27th (tomorrow!), I thought I should ask if it is ok
> to add this to the feature plan. (Also, should I add IconTasks itself
> (say for plasma-addons) as well?)
I think it's great that you want to bring back your changes :-) And 
given the positive feedback I have heard for your tasks implementation I 
would  like to see this in 4.8, so yes please add it to the feature 
plan.
>
> The main changes to the taskmanager library aren't really that much;
>
> 1. I've changed the way launchers are stored - this is so that I can
> save the order, so that users may manually re-order them. This means
> code would need to be written to convert any existing config to this
> new scheme.
You can do that with a KConfig Update script. There's some good 
documentation on techbase about it.
>
> 2. When 'pinning' an app to the taskbar where the taskmanager cannot
> determine the desktop file (as happens even for System Settings!), 
> the
> existing taskmanager embeds a copy of the tasks icon, and other
> details, into the plasma config file. Icon Tasks instead will prompt
> the user to select the app from the list of installed applications.
That sounds reasonable, though the best solution would be to fix the 
mapping, but that might be a frameworks task (what I have in mind is a 
_KDE_NET_WM_DESKTOP_FILE property which is set on the window 
automatically)
>
> 3. I've added more queries to attempt to automatically determine the
> desktop file for a window. If this fails, the user is prompted to
> manually set the launcher.
>
> 4. Option to have simple right-click menus for tasks
>
> 5. 'Start New Instance' right-click action.
For both 4 and 5 it would be nice to redo the complete menu and 
structure it in a better way as well as to share it with KWin. We had a 
small discussion about it on the KWin list, but somehow nobody did 
something about it :-(
>
> 6. Allow applet to supply task actions to appear at top of
> right-click menu. This is where IconTasks will place 
> DockManager/Unity
> supplied menus, and display the list of recent documents.
nice
>
> ...and that's basically it for the taskmanager changes. There's a
> *lot* of debug code, #ifdef'ed out, that would need to be removed. 
> The
> only sticking point, AFAIK, will be the reading of pre-existing
> launchers where these are not mapped to a .desktop file. As I said,
> IconTasks does not support this - and I don't think embedding the
> icon, etc, in the config file is a good idea anyway.
>
> So, should I add these changes to the feature plan? I wont actually
> do any merges without posting diffs for review first. Or is it just
> too late, in which case I can wait for 4.9 :-)
We have two weeks for review and I am sure our users would appreciate 
it, so yes please add :-)

Cheers
Martin
>
> Craig.