View previous topic :: View next topic |
Author |
Message |
gerard27 Advocate
Joined: 04 Jan 2004 Posts: 2377 Location: Netherlands
|
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2011 11:37 pm Post subject: |
|
|
@ iandoug,
Man, thanks very much for the link to recoll!!
I installed 1.16.2 and it is really unbelievable what it is capable of.
I entered .mp3 and it came up with not only the music I have but even with audacity zipped howto where .mp3 was mentioned.
And it shows an icon for the type of file it is,like a loudspeaker for music.
I also tried .xcf which is the native Gimp format it opens Gimp when you click open.
Makes you wonder why the KDE devs are still mucking around with their crap.
Gerard. _________________ To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download |
|
Back to top |
|
|
albright Advocate
Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 2588 Location: Near Toronto
|
Posted: Fri Dec 23, 2011 5:55 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I want to take back what I said about recoll
Because it is a system of good old fashion scripts in plain
text, it was not hard to track down and fix the little
problem I had
(in case anyone is wondering, you need to feed the -o option
to an unzip line if one of recoll's openoffice filter)
recoll is in fact robust, effective and very useful _________________ .... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme) |
|
Back to top |
|
|
der bastler Apprentice
Joined: 13 Apr 2003 Posts: 262
|
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2012 7:05 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Sorry for digging up this old thread, but I have to add new experiences. Last post was in Jul 2010.
Recently I installed Kontact again. Thought it might have matured. At first it seemed that I could finally return to KDEPIM. But yesterday portage pulled in an update to KDE and ended up with Nepomuk/Akonadiserver running at 100 % CPU. Or in other words: these programs were keeping my CPU hot. Granted, its cold outside in Europe, but having my two cores constantly running at 65+ °C felt wrong.
It felt doubly wrong considering that I don't need such services.
Therefore I returned to Thunderbird and am now cleaning my system. Strange, everytime you think your KDE desktop is running smoothly and you might start working they come around a corner and mess it up.
Bottom line: nothing new since Jul 30 2010, for me.
Oh, except for razor-qt, that's new. Watching intently... _________________ Tempus fugit.
@frank@troet.cafe |
|
Back to top |
|
|
turtles Veteran
Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1664
|
Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 2:28 am Post subject: |
|
|
I like it when people dig up old threads.
I did get a test version of KDE libs to compile with out all that NAS (Nepomuk / Akonadi / Srrigi)
stuff put into IFDEFS I lost interest and thought the community was not interested.
Basically it all could be 'use' flagged out.
That would be work to maintain a custom overlay of NAS optional ebuilds.
You can get kmail and everything that depends on KDE that doesn't use that NAS to build, running without crashes might be another storey.
I think Srrigi was the most annoying to get rid of. _________________ Donate to Gentoo |
|
Back to top |
|
|
steveL Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 5153 Location: The Peanut Gallery
|
Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2012 10:53 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Setting USE= -semantic-desktop was the best thing I ever did for my KDE install.
It only became an issue when KMail started to rely on akonadi. It was painful, but I let go of the email client I've been using for over a decade: and I am so glad I did. I use mutt now, and though it took a while to setup, it's beautiful (I use it with getmail and procmail.)
There was zero need for KMail to switch to akonadi, and in fact it worked terribly (it's a broken design imo.) As for redland/virtuoso/soprano and God knows what other crap it pulled in.. let's just say my machine runs a lot slicker now. The other thing that has really made it zippier (for some reason: it wasn't my aim) has been to get rid of all the *kit crap.
If KDE ever stops working like this, I will switch, despite it being my consistent choice of desktop for the last 15 years or so. As is, I'm able to use it since it is meant to work on BSD and Solaris etc as well, and I don't see Qt suddenly becoming Linux-specific.
AFAIC Gnome are trying to get ahead in the race by shooting themselves in the foot.
edit: link to guide to switching from KMail to mutt. _________________
creaker wrote: | systemd. It is a really ass pain |
update - "a most excellent portage wrapper"
#friendly-coders -- We're still here for you™ ;)
Last edited by steveL on Thu Dec 27, 2012 7:20 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
Back to top |
|
|
gentooP4 Apprentice
Joined: 20 Sep 2010 Posts: 182 Location: NZ
|
Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2012 3:40 pm Post subject: |
|
|
steveL wrote: | Setting USE= -semantic-desktop was the best thing I ever did for my KDE install. |
^ This is true.
I just get my email delivered to my phone nowdays. _________________ The United States has announced that it will deploy thoughts and prayers in the battle against online extremism.
If you voted for Trump or Brexit, you were likely influenced by the Cambridge Analytica propaganda machine. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
j-kidd Apprentice
Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 213
|
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2013 5:25 am Post subject: |
|
|
dolphin in 4.9.97 now requires USE="semantic-desktop" |
|
Back to top |
|
|
mv Watchman
Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6749
|
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2013 10:30 pm Post subject: |
|
|
j-kidd wrote: | dolphin in 4.9.97 now requires USE="semantic-desktop" |
This is horrible news. If it isn't an oversight in the ebuild, I am afraid that this means kde has completely to go from my disks. I had to return to fvwm essentially now, anyway. It is such a pity that software development means nowadays practically only regression or steps into a completely wrong direction: nepomuk, *kit+systemd, gnome3- and nautilus-castration, making parted useless, unnecessary autotool deprecations, ... meanwhile I am less and less convinced that linux is a good system, because most of its positive aspects have step by step been destroyed: Complete control over the system, powerful tools, convenient usage especially for programmers - all is vanishing. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
roravun Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 05 Sep 2012 Posts: 82
|
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2013 11:01 pm Post subject: |
|
|
mv,
Quote: | unnecessary autotool deprecations, |
What? I have yet to see any buildsystem at least as flexible and portable as autotools.
Apart from QT, and some particular packages I have not noticed an exodus from autotools land. AFAIK all GNOME is using it.
Quote: | less and less convinced that linux is a good system |
Nah, the kernel is in a good shape. It is only that some DE guys like to integrate, and some, like GNOME, are rolling their own system. It is not forced upon everybody.
There is plenty of space for those who are sceptical of the "progress". Gentoo is one such place. systemd is not going to get you here |
|
Back to top |
|
|
mv Watchman
Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6749
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:53 am Post subject: |
|
|
roravun wrote: | Quote: | unnecessary autotool deprecations, |
What? I have yet to see any buildsystem at least as flexible and portable as autotools. |
I also thought so, but the new generation of GNU tols is a huge step backwards: New syntax AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS introduced, and immediately obsoleting ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS, i.e. you have to change config.ac's immediately and are not able to write autotols config files which run with old and current versions of autotools unless you are willing to confuse the user with warnings if he has the new version. Deprecated functions which gettext uses since years, without an update of gettext in sight, thus permantly producing warnings (and maybe soon not working at all) ... it really has become a mess.
Worst thing in my opiniion GNU made recently is of course the parted disaster.
Quote: | Quote: | less and less convinced that linux is a good system |
Nah, the kernel is in a good shape. |
Maybe, but I had some fatal bugs recently (somewhere in this forum you will find my thread about how to avoid that ext4 destroys regularly megabytes of data...), currently I cannot get my dvbt stick to run, although it is reported to work... maybe I had just bad luck, but this also accumulates recently. Moreover, important things like aufs/overlayfs are still not in kernel since years. Nvidia-drivers-173 (needed on one of my systems) does not run with current kernel while nouveau keeps crashing; on another machine, nvidia-drivers-310.19 does not work with pax memory protection (OK, this is not the kernel itself) while nouveau cannot activate dpms. As I mentioned, issues accumulate recently.
Quote: | It is only that some DE guys like to integrate |
Not only: A lot of functions are removed from GNOME (side-by-side view of directories, to name one example). Moreover, for a Unix-based system one could hardly have a worse idea than to force every user to download and install the same add-ons from the web, of course without any possibility to even transfer this setting to another system.
Quote: | It is not forced upon everybody. Gentoo is one such place. systemd is not going to get you here |
Let us speak again in two or three years. You will see that you prognosis is false unless you remove more and more programs. This is what already happened with KDE: Successively, I had to remove for varying reasons: amarok, kuickview, kdetv, kmail, kaudiocreator, k3b, and now even dolphin; most are without a comparable substitute - my systems just successively lost essential functionality and gained as a substitute nothing which I would consider a value. Currently, I have kde only for kdm, filelight, and okular - who knows for how long these will remain.
There once was a time where there were even working free alternatives to skype before kde decided that this all needs a big integration into a kopete without working VOIP (maybe this is fixed meanwhile after many years, but I doubt, because AFAIK they started this new system instead whose name I forgot, but which does not run without nepomuk). |
|
Back to top |
|
|
albright Advocate
Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 2588 Location: Near Toronto
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 3:13 am Post subject: |
|
|
Quote: | There once was a time |
so when you want to get things done, do you use
your mac or windows machine? _________________ .... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme) |
|
Back to top |
|
|
roravun Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 05 Sep 2012 Posts: 82
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 2:07 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Quote: | Let us speak again in two or three years. (...) |
Well, I did not say that more and more applications that are a *part of* (or were sucked into it) DE (mainly GNOME, KDE) environment won't become tightly integrated and require
you to download gigabytes worth of dependencies to do even the simplest thing. What you are trying to accomplish, i.e. to have usable, The UNIX way™ etc. in
a hostile environment, that for quite a long time has been doing things in exact opposite of principles you would like to see, is simply going to fail.
I personally have migrated to WM, after being a long time GNOME 2 user. GNOME 3 was obviously the end of the "Old", so why would I fight against the river?
Most everyday apps I use are not part of any DE suite: Keepassx, xchat, exaile, qbittorrent, emacs,
evince, firefox, audacity, gimp, blender are pretty standalone, and thus invulnerable to the poison
PS
I just noticed I am doing a huge offtop. Sorry |
|
Back to top |
|
|
Yamakuzure Advocate
Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2285 Location: Adendorf, Germany
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:34 pm Post subject: |
|
|
j-kidd wrote: | dolphin in 4.9.97 now requires USE="semantic-desktop" | No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally. _________________ Important German:- "Aha" - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck.
- "Tja" - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house.
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
AgBr Apprentice
Joined: 06 Nov 2010 Posts: 195
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 7:25 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Yamakuzure wrote: | j-kidd wrote: | dolphin in 4.9.97 now requires USE="semantic-desktop" | No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally. |
I hope and pray that they will keep it that way. The home-directories of my users reside on a nfs-mount. The NAS-stuff does not work nicely with nfs-mounts. Elsewhere I have read that the KDE-folk is considering nfs-mounted homes obsolete as most people are using mobile devices with amba-shares anyway |
|
Back to top |
|
|
steveL Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 5153 Location: The Peanut Gallery
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 7:45 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Yamakuzure wrote: | j-kidd wrote: | dolphin in 4.9.97 now requires USE="semantic-desktop" :( | No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally. |
Not much of a difference, imo: I don't want those libraries installed, leave alone running, and went to a fair amount of effort to get rid of them in the first place. Further, requiring it in the file-manager implies a broader system-wide acceptance of those technologies as a base requirement: something I see getting worse over time, not better (after all, akonadi, virtuoso, redland, all the above, and a full-blown mysql server are required to read email..) Guess I'll switch to spacefm or w/e it's called, along with uam or pmount. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
asturm Developer
Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8938
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 7:59 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The semantic-desktop force should be gone in 4.9.97, it's just broken currently without it. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
mv Watchman
Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6749
|
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2013 8:53 pm Post subject: |
|
|
albright wrote: | Quote: | There once was a time |
so when you want to get things done, do you use
your mac or windows machine? |
Not yet, though it looks more like I will have to, since meanwhile there are several things which I cannot get done with linux anymore: Even a simple task like copying a memory chip of a device of mine of to a larger chip (which meant I had to extend a fat16 filesystem to keep the boatloader) would not have been possible if <parted-3 would already have been removed from the portage tree (which for sure will happen sooner or later). Moreover, to skype I also had to sell my soul, already. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
sitquietly Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 23 Oct 2010 Posts: 143 Location: On the Wolf River, Tennessee
|
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2013 11:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
steveL wrote: | Yamakuzure wrote: | j-kidd wrote: | dolphin in 4.9.97 now requires USE="semantic-desktop" | No. It enforces the semantic-desktop USE flag on kdelibs (which will add dev-libs/shared-desktop-ontologies, dev-libs/soprano, nepomuk-core and nepomuk-widgets. It does not require you to enable "semantic-desktop" globally. |
.....something I see getting worse over time, not better (after all, akonadi, virtuoso, redland, all the above, and a full-blown mysql server are required to read email..)..... |
When I switched to gentoo (from arch) I enjoyed finding that in gentoo mysql is actually not required for kde --- I run all of kde and kdepim with semantic desktop using sqlite. mysql is not installed on my system. No special tricks were required, just add "sqlite -mysql" to USE in make.conf
This gives me a very complete and stable kde desktop:
Code: |
USE="-avahi -fam -mono -mysql -qt3 -wxwidgets a52 aac bittorrent bluetooth branding cairo cdda cddb consolekit corefonts crypt cups dbus declarative djvu dri emacs encode exif farstream ffmpeg fontforge g3dvl gstreamer gtk guile handbook icu id3tag inotify introspection jack java javascript kde kdepim kipi lapack latex lcdfilter lcms libnotify lua lzma marble modplug mp4 musicbrainz opengl pdf phonon plasma policykit postscript pulseaudio qt3support qt4 semantic-desktop session speex spell sqlite -startup-notification svg taglib tcl telepathy theora threads tk truetype twolame type1 udev usb vaapi vim-syntax vlc webkit x264 xcomposite xft xv xvmc"
|
KDE can't be beat for organizing my workflow. Activities are very useful and I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop It's been kind to me for several months now (no runaway cpu use, no data loss, no strange problems -- it all just works fine); of course I may yank it out by the roots if it misbehaves ever again... |
|
Back to top |
|
|
albright Advocate
Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 2588 Location: Near Toronto
|
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:38 am Post subject: |
|
|
Quote: | I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop |
yes, I find all the akonadi stuff pretty stable now, but I'm mad that
kmail does not know how to use my kaddressbook - it does not
pop up names from the book when I start entering the "To"
box
but that's not much to complain about ... _________________ .... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme) |
|
Back to top |
|
|
turtles Veteran
Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1664
|
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 2:38 am Post subject: |
|
|
albright wrote: | Quote: | I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop |
yes, I find all the akonadi stuff pretty stable now, but I'm mad that
kmail does not know how to use my kaddressbook - it does not
pop up names from the book when I start entering the "To"
box
but that's not much to complain about ... |
It is possible to patch and compile kmail to use grep like it used to in 3.5.9
I think I posted about how to do it. _________________ Donate to Gentoo |
|
Back to top |
|
|
steveL Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 5153 Location: The Peanut Gallery
|
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 5:26 am Post subject: |
|
|
sitquietly wrote: | When I switched to gentoo (from arch) I enjoyed finding that in gentoo mysql is actually not required for kde --- I run all of kde and kdepim with semantic desktop using sqlite. mysql is not installed on my system. No special tricks were required, just add "sqlite -mysql" to USE in make.conf |
Trust me, I've been there. I've been using KDE for donkey's years, and I've stuck with it throughout. I'm glad it worked for you, but it didn't for me. I ran around in circles for a while, getting told it was to do with threading, then configuration etc. Then I thought to myself "this is ridiculous. I used to run KDE on a K6-2 450 with 64MB of RAM.." and started to wonder about the "value" that is added by this leap to integration without getting the basics right.
Quote: | KDE can't be beat for organizing my workflow. Activities are very useful and I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop :oops: It's been kind to me for several months now (no runaway cpu use, no data loss, no strange problems -- it all just works fine); of course I may yank it out by the roots if it misbehaves ever again... |
Ah, so it has misbehaved before. Personally I just don't see the need to reinvent notmuch badly. It would have been much saner, and more useful, if they had just wrapped a UI around some of the excellent command line tools, which is the tradition that they came from, along with a minimal spec for communication between UI elements (problems that were solved in technical terms decades ago.)
K3b is a good example, and kmail used to be a model of how to do it, with its display of the SMTP(etc) log in the status bar, available at a click: it was discussed in the Art of Unix Programming (or some Eric Raymond book) as an example of a useful UI that keeps Unix transparency.
I don't personally care about getting a systray icon notifying me of new email when my email client isn't running. In workflow terms, it's far too distracting (it's a well-known phenomenon in most offices). Additionally the time I had with no email at home made me appreciate Knuth's stance a whole lot more. It certainly doesn't merit wholesale changes in the lower layers, nor do any of the other "features": if anything it indicates a lack of technical maturity.
Shiny interfaces work much better on top of a rock-solid basis (that's why Apple ended up ditching their operating system kernel for a BSD codebase.) While I've always been used to KDE not being very stable til about x.4 (eg 3.4 started to be okay), the 4.x series has been ridiculous, frankly amateurish in the stuff that's been pushed out and with a worrying lack of thought behind the "strategic direction".
It runs nice and smooth now, though, without semantic-craptop (I could not believe the amount of bloat that got removed for that), no nubkit rubbish also made it slicker for some reason, and mutt rocks (though I wouldn't mind a minimal gui wrapped round it, getmail with procmail, and notmuch :-) |
|
Back to top |
|
|
sitquietly Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 23 Oct 2010 Posts: 143 Location: On the Wolf River, Tennessee
|
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 7:08 am Post subject: |
|
|
steveL wrote: |
Trust me, I've been there. I've been using KDE for donkey's years, and ..... started to wonder about the "value" that is added by this leap to integration without getting the basics right.
|
sitquietly wrote: | KDE can't be beat for organizing my workflow. Activities are very useful and I've talked myself into loving semantic desktop It's been kind to me for several months now (no runaway cpu use, no data loss, no strange problems -- it all just works fine); of course I may yank it out by the roots if it misbehaves ever again... |
steveL wrote: |
Ah, so it has misbehaved before. ..... |
Oh yes. I gave up on semantic desktop in kde 4.6 and 4.7. I ripped nepomuk stuff out of kde in my archlinux system, and THAT took a lot of work Only in kde 4.8 and especially 4.9 am I timorously commiting to it. To be honest I maintain three alternate root partitions: (1) gentoo unstable ~amd64 with kde/kdepim with semantic desktop, (2) funtoo current ~amd64 configured almost identically with semantic desktop, and (3) a funtoo stripped-down fallback with kde WITHOUT semantic desktop, and WITHOUT consolekit, policykit or udisks. The fittest will survive.
steveL wrote: | Shiny interfaces work much better on top of a rock-solid basis..... |
For several years my "rock-solid" desktop of choice has been xmonad with rox filer and my own scripts for maintaing activity-specific panels. My scripts check which desktop environment I'm running and fire up dolphin or rox, kmail or claws-mail, konsole or roxterm, etc, as appropriate. I've started experimenting with e17 as an alternative. Enlightenment looks promising but will require a lot of customization to suit my needs. Apparently kde with semantic desktop is giving me a good experience -- lately I find myself telling slim to start the nepomuked kde and often I work in it for days without cursing once. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
steveL Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 5153 Location: The Peanut Gallery
|
Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 9:57 pm Post subject: |
|
|
sitquietly wrote: |
I gave up on semantic desktop in kde 4.6 and 4.7. I ripped nepomuk stuff out of kde in my archlinux system, and THAT took a lot of work :lol: Only in kde 4.8 and especially 4.9 am I timorously commiting to it. To be honest I maintain three alternate root partitions: (1) gentoo unstable ~amd64 with kde/kdepim with semantic desktop, (2) funtoo current ~amd64 configured almost identically with semantic desktop, and (3) a funtoo stripped-down fallback with kde WITHOUT semantic desktop, and WITHOUT consolekit, policykit or udisks. The fittest will survive. |
Well I wouldn't run an unstable Gentoo install, if I were you. Stable gentoo, with stuff unmasked as and when you need it (update is really nice for that), combined with FEATURES=buildpkg so you can rollback, makes for a lovely machine ime, and it works efficiently once you get rid of akonadi, nepomuk et al.
sitquietly wrote: |
For several years my "rock-solid" desktop of choice has been xmonad with rox filer and my own scripts for maintaing activity-specific panels. My scripts check which desktop environment I'm running and fire up dolphin or rox, kmail or claws-mail, konsole or roxterm, etc, as appropriate. I've started experimenting with e17 as an alternative. Enlightenment looks promising but will require a lot of customization to suit my needs. Apparently kde with semantic desktop is giving me a good experience -- lately I find myself telling slim to start the nepomuked kde and often I work in it for days without cursing once. |
Yeah xmonad is cool: #gentoo-haskell bods are perhaps the nicest group of gentoo-devs I've come across. You clearly have a lot of time and inclination to tweak configs, and even maintain 3 separate installs. I don't, and I like my desktop to be boringly reliable, until I choose to start playing. And KDE has always made an effort to be a polished setup, with good defaults and configuration options for when you need to change something. This series has been the exact opposite, half-baked and ill-conceived afaic, and the reason is the dumbass Poettering-mentality of changing everything because you can, to suit the use-case you're worried about, and sod everyone else who doesn't quite fit. IOW I'm still not seeing the value added that warrants the wholesale butchery of the processing model.
It would have been so simple, and elegant, just to leave the basics alone and add glitz at a higher layer. Instead the tail wags the dog, and trivial interface improvements are used as justification for major changes at lower-levels, where they have no business, and indeed borked software is the result, til users have spent a few years fixing it. Colossal waste of effort, imo. |
|
Back to top |
|
|
steveL Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 5153 Location: The Peanut Gallery
|
Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2013 9:03 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I've just found "Attach as tab to.." in KDE-4.9, and it is sweet :-) It makes working with 3 kate sessions (for a big code project) really nice.
It's a great example of what I mean by "leave the basics alone and add glitz at a higher layer". I love that it's all done at the WM level, with no changes in the underlying apps whatsoever. This means it's totally generic and works with every app you can run, and requires no "inturgration" code in any of them. So, if I needed to work on a diagram to do with my code say, or any other app I might need, that's just as easy and still part of the same app-group.
As soon as I mentioned this, a friend (who shall remain nameless) immediately said "Hrm, maybe that would be a motivation for the kate devs to implement multi-session support natively?" which in my mind would be exactly the wrong way to do it. Keeping the separation means kate devs don't need to go there, and can focus on what they're good at. Separate taskbar entries is just what's required, which you wouldn't get with kate handling it all (which would also add a lot of complexity and bloat to kate for no reason.. just like semantic-craptop.) And those can still be merged with an easy selection, if desired. That they happen to be the same app is irrelevant, so long as it's well-behaved.
Multi-processing and demarcation of responsibilities is a good thing: easier to grok for the user as well as the developer and admins, simpler to code and more efficient than inturgrated "solutions".
Note that I'm not saying there is no scope to add awareness of running in a group to a KDE app, enabled by kdelibs across the DE in a future release. That is not the same as making the app do the work itself, which is analogous to a lot of the push for inturgration requiring wholesale changes to the model in lower layers, instead of doing it right and managing complexity at a higher level, building on solid base components. It would be an option for the developers, iff it actually makes sense for the app in question, but in no way needed for this to be useful.
For instance, it might be nice if kate didn't warn about editing a file in another process, iff that process were another kate session running in the same tab-group. But that really is a trivial change in comparison to kate handling the multi-session natively. And it certainly would not merit any major code changes: the user can just turn that feature off on a per-session basis already. But since it's been done the right way, the major functionality is all there, and minor improvements are just that: both minor in scope and real improvements, since now it's a question of "what?" given the major "how?" that is implemented right.
Even if that never gets added, and I'd prefer it not to be if it needs significant code changes to any app, the feature is excellent as-is, and incredibly useful. It doesn't dictate anything to the user, it merely enables a greater deal of control over existing processes. It's a great example of providing mechanism, and not dictating policy.
Frankly it's what they should have been doing from the beginning of the 4.x series, and more importantly how they should have been doing it, instead of all that wasted effort on functionality that doesn't enable anything new for the end-user. I can only hope they're returning to form :-) |
|
Back to top |
|
|
brothermechanic n00b
Joined: 10 Dec 2012 Posts: 37
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|