March Iteration of Frameworks epic

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Friday 09 March 2012 18:11:53 Kevin Ottens wrote:
> On Friday 09 March 2012 17:58:35 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> > A few things I will have to discuss with the KDE Frameworks maintainers.
> > E.g. I think we should drop the Windows and MacOS X implementations of
> > KWindowSystem as it is too close to our X world.
> 
> Disclaimer: I'm close to clueless about KWindowSystem and friends, mainly
> shuffling options here.
> 
> I'm wondering if that's a wise choice or if it would be better to make the
> API of KWindowSystem less "X oriented". Especially if it lands in Tier 1 I
> would see a strong value in the possibility of using KWindowSystem API on
> non-X systems. I count at least Wayland based systems which will appear at
> some point, we'd better be ready for them if possible. Also the Windows and
> MacOS X support are an interesting asset for the library reusability.
The library is mostly a wrapper for the Extended Window Manger Hints 
freedesktop spec. It contains things like setting a window to be kept above 
other windows. Features not at all available on any system except X (and later 
on KWin+Wayland). I just had a look at the implementations on Windows [1] and 
Mac [2]. Both are mostly stubs around "isn't yet implemented" debug messages.

So personally I question the usefulness of this API for non X (or 
KWin+Wayland) systems.

I just did a short lxr.kde.org search and it seems that applications using it 
do not have the calls in an ifdef block. So this might be problematic.

Supporting Wayland will btw require quite some work as that will be a change 
of how the API is designed. The API currently assumes that there is just one 
windowing system compiled (usage of ifdef). But that won't be the case with 
Wayland. On the same platform we will have either Wayland or X or most likely 
both. I have some ideas how to handle that but it will require more thinking.

Cheers
Martin

[1]: http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-
apidocs/kdeui/html/kwindowsystem__win_8cpp_source.html
[2]: http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-
apidocs/kdeui/html/kwindowsystem__mac_8cpp_source.html
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