Exception for Dolphin - KFileMetadataWidget

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Divendres, 21 de desembre de 2012, a les 16:27:17, Vishesh Handa va 
escriure:
> Hello release team
> 
> As most of you must know for KDE 4.9, a new package nepmuk-core was
> released, and with 4.10 we are now releasing nepomuk-widgets. The
> nepomuk-widgets initially just contained the Tagging and Rating widgets,
> which were adapted from kdelibs/nepomuk/ui. I use the word "adapted" cause
> their internals were ported to the new asynchronous APIs (which was the
> reason nepomuk-core was created)
> 
> One of the primary ways users tag and rate files is through the information
> panel in Dolphin. The main widget in this panel is the KFileMetadataWidget
> (kdelibs/kio/kfile/*). This widget has many problems -
> 
> * Uses the old Nepomuk Resource API from kdelibs - very buggy
> * Uses the old Nepomuk widgets from kdelibs - slower and not maintained
> * Had a multi-process architecture which involved spawning a new process
> which provided the Nepomuk / Strigi ** data. This was done cause Strigi is
> known to crash a lot.
> * Cause of this multi-process architecture it was very slow - specially on
> the Nepomuk side cause it would re-create the caches each time the process
> was run. This was especially wasteful because Dolphin itself uses Nepomuk
> and would have those caches. (The caches are not cross-application)
> * Hacking on the widget was hard - Its entire architecture is quite
> convoluted.
> 
> I wanted to fix this with 4.10, so I copied most of the widget to
> nepomuk-widgets and named it Nepomuk2::FileMetadataWidget. This "new"
> widget was added in the feature plan [1]. It was never marked as completed
> cause it had some bugs, which I did not have the time to fix. It was
> however, still merged before the hard feature freeze.
> 
> I did not submit my patch to use this widget in Dolphin, as it had some
> bugs, and I did not want to spoil Dolphin's experience. In hind-sight maybe
> I should have submitted it, and gotten all the bug reports.
> 
> Fast forwarding to present time
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> I finally squashed the last of the bugs in the widget, and made it support
> displaying indexing results even when the file was not indexed or Nepomuk
> is disabled. The old KFileMetadataWidget had the same capability - It used
> Strigi, while we use the new file indexer that I've been working on.
> 
> I would like to use this new widget in dolphin for 4.10. I was told to ask
> for an exception from the release team. We still have one more release
> candidate to go, so it should get adequate testing, if not the full amount.
> 
> Other advantages -
> 
> * It is a LOT faster - and it feels like it (Patch attached, if you want to
> try it out)
> * Easier to maintain
> * Uses the Nepomuk2 widgets which are actively maintained, and will thus
> get the required bug fixes. They have been some bugs filed against Dolphin
> and its tagging behaviour, fixing this would be quite hard in
> kdelibs/Nepomuk, also I don't want to mess with that code base which barely
> gets tested any more.
> * Since Dolphin also uses Nepomuk2, and the new widget does not spawn a new
> process for the Nepomuk data, it can re-use the already filled caches.
> * This gives a much better experience even when Nepomuk is disabled.
> * This new widget's internal architecture is a lot better, and it's easy to
> modify - So it's easy to improve.
> 
> If we do not ship this new widget, I'll have to clean up the
> KFileMetadataWidget cause it shows a lot of ugly data like "Resource
> Created", arguably this isn't very hard. However it is not something I want
> to do. Ditto for kdelibs/nepomuk/*.
> 
> So, may I merge my patch into kde-baseapps 4.10? It will get tested more
> thoroughly in RC2.

What's the opinion of the Dolphin maintainer?

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> [1] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.10_Feature_Plan