Plasma 5.8 and look and feel layouts

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 11.09.2016 22:49, Łukasz Sawicki wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In the last week I tested a new Plasma 5.8 feature "Look and feel
> layouts" to have something for our Plasma 5.8 promo materials. Let me
> share some experiences here.
>
>
> 1. Random crashes (especially when I switch "Look and feel layouts"
> for the first time. Unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce this
> reliably
>
> 2. Basic functionality not working correctly
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367918
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368074
> 3. Some other weird bugs
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368022
I'd say these are just bugs to be fixed. That's what beta testing is for.
> Since this is a new feature bugs are to be expected and I am sure
> Plasma team will fix them for Plasma 5.8 release.  But what worries me
> the most is the missing functionality of plasma look and feel packages
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367921
>
> which may result in broken desktop
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=367920
>
> Simply put when users will download a new lf package from
> kde-look/store they will expect that plasma lf package will provide
> all elements like icons, wallpapers, plasma themes, plasma applets
> etc.  We can't expect from our users to manually download all required
> packages when installing plasma lf package. I am afraid that in the
> current state we will get many comments from our users about yet
> another unfinished Plasma feature and not working content in KDE
> Store.
That is indeed a problem which we need a solution for before we ship this feature.
I agree that we cannot expect users to hunt down all the individual themes that 
make up an L&F theme.
This has to happen automatically if we activate the feature to download L&F 
themes via KNS.
> So here my proposal. Lets postpone this feature for Plasma 5.9 and
> remove any visible parts from look and feel kcm ("use desktop layout
> from theme" and "get new looks").
Why give up before we tried?
If we can fix the issues before the release, why holding it back?
> So guys please work on this a little bit more and release something we
> can be proud of, like this:
>
> https://youtu.be/aLKHycF4rPw
>
No need to be extra-vehement here. You pointed out valid and important issues, 
now it's the Plasma
team's task to deal with them, in one way or another.

Cheers,
Thomas