plans for Plasma Desktop default containment in QML

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi fellow Plasma devs,

I've been working on a QML port of our default desktop containment. It's still 
very immature, and a few feature are lacking, but it lead me to think about 
how we could go about replacing the default desktop with this eventually.

Now it won't be ready (in sufficient quality) for the 4.10 feature freeze, but 
I'd like to give our users a way to provide feedback before we actually 
replace the current C++ containment.

About the containment itself, it's of course supposed to be on feature-parity 
with the current containment, and I'm aiming for having it look at least as 
polished as that one. My current work is loosely based on Marco's Activity 
Screen containment which is in use for quite some time in Plasma Active, 
though it only reuses its applet placing mechanism.

This work goes along with a number of merges, some of which are bugfixes (not 
much to talk about, I'm filing review requests as we go, they're being merged 
in the process), some are things that we have been shipping in the 
MobileComponents QML module for some time. (MobileComponents has somehow grown 
to be a dumping ground for "stuff that didn't fit well elsewhere", and we're 
in the process of cleaning that up, moving pieces of it to places which fit 
better (PlasmaExtras has gotten some, for example.) One of those pieces is the 
AppletContainer, but there's also the odd thing that we have just no solution 
for right now (for example KAuthorized calls if the user's allowed to log 
out). I'm trying to find sensible places for those (for example some of them 
can go into the containment bindings as that's what they're used for), filing 
reviewrequests for those things in the process so we can decide on a case-by-
case basis.

My overall thinking is that I'd like the infrastructural work to be complete 
for the 4.10 release (which seems achievable to me if we don't run into 
architectural problems) so that Plasma 4.10 brings everything needed to run 
full-featured QML containments. We can then invite users to try the new 
default containment, give us feedback and give it a couple of iterations until 
perfection. (As the new containment is a pure QML package, our group of 
testers is not limited to those being able to wield a compiler.)

You can find the code in kde-workspace's plasma/sebas/desktop-qml branch, 
you'll also need kde-runtime's plasma/sebas/desktop-qml branch for the 
bindings extensions and bugfixes that are still in process of being merged. Be 
aware that it's really work-in-progress and that anything could change, 
anytime. I'm concentrating on getting the toolbox to work in all aspects, then 
will likely move to the Applethandle.

So, just a heads-up of current plans and impressions. Feedback is naturally 
welcome. :)

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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