The QML Pager plasmoid

[Ralf Jung]

Hi Plasma Developers,

let me repeat what I already wrote in the bugreport [1]:

I am kind of surprised that the pager was accepted as-is, but now there
does not seem to be agreement any more on how it should behave. Clearly
there was some intended behaviour when it got merged? Or nobody cared
about the case of one virtual desktop (which explains why this bug went
unnoticed), but then why does anyone care now?
Of course, as an outsider this is easily said ;-)

If I understood the earlier discussion properly, we are essentially
waiting for someone to implement the following changes:

- Add a boolean option (hidden or not) to the pager to control whether
the pager is shown for 1 VD or not (where "not shown" means "taking up
no space whatsoever")
- Set this option to "hide" for the default pager, while setting it to
"show" for pagers added manually

What's the reason the pager is not simply removed from the default
setup? Then the the special case for 1 VD could be removed. In the
discussion it was mentioned that someone increasing the number of VDs
would then also have to add the pager manually, however (as has been
said there) VDs are a power-user feature, and these power-users should
certainly be able to quickly add a widget to the panel. It's not like
one sets up a new KDE desktop every day, this is a one-time
configuration "effort". This solution would not only be much easier to
implement, it would also not have the issue of introducing invisible
items into the panel. (For example, how does that pager behave when
editing widgets? Can it even be removed without editing config files?)
Distributions changing the default number of virtual desktops can simply
add the pager to the default layout if they want, after all, KDE has
proper infrastructure for that.

This is a really embarrassing bug showing up within the first minute of
KDE usage in a default configuration, which is why I'd like to help fix
it (even though it doesn't affect me, I just remove the pager).

Kind regards,
Ralf

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312684

On 11/03/13 15:13, Rick Stockton wrote:
> I don't matter much, but your plan gets "+1" from me.
> People can find the hidden config by searching for bugs: they'll find
> their 'resolution' in #312684.
> 
> On 03/10/2013 12:15 PM, Mark wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> We've already had a long lengthy discussion about this [1] and i'm
>> really not about to start that over again. The conclusions thus far
>> seem clear to me, but they are for the future and still "leave a gap"
>> (in every sense) for the current 4.10 cycle.
>>
>> The conclusions:
>> - Remove the pager by default
>> - When one adds the pager it should be expected that the user really
>> wants to add the pager so show it regardless the number of VD's.
>>
>> Some more conclusions in case the pager would stay (copied from
>> Aaron's mail regarding this subject)
>> /// copy
>> * hide the pager applet in the chooser when there is only 1 VD. this isn't
>> great as it means if you have only 1 VD you don't get a pager ever. it also
>> means lots of instrumentation in the chooser (and probably more stuff in the
>> applet .desktop files) to make this happen. -1
>>
>> * put a configuration option in the pager which controls the "hide when VD ==
>> 1" behaviour. this could be a hidden config value defaulting to off, allowing it
>> to be used by the default panel script .. or it could be in the UI, making it
>> easy to set whenever.
>>
>> personally, i lean towards hidden config. if you want a pager that's always
>> visible, just add one.
>> /// end copy
>>
>> I personally lean towards removing the pager completely and make it
>> always visible when it gets added. Right now we are in the situation
>> where the pager "empty gap" is being noticed and reported [2]
>>
>> I'd like to do the following:
>> 1. for the next 4.10.x patch release patch the main.qml file for this
>> pager and just show it always. That solves the open gap issue and
>> fixes the out of the box experience in this case.
>> 2. for the next release (4.11) remove the pager altogether from the
>> default setup. I do like to know where and how to do that since i
>> don't know :)
>>
>> I really like to jump to some final conclusions here for the 4.10.2 release.
>> Does this sound like a good plan?
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Mark
>>
>> [1] http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2013-February/023991.html
>> [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312684
>>
>